Philochristos

If there is no God, then there are no objective moral values

2012-02-02T21:20:00.003-05:00

I tried to find some really old posts I made on beliefnet back in the day, and I found this thread: "The use of reason in religion" on the UU section of beliefnet. This was one of my earliest attempts to defend the premise that God is necessary for objective morality, going all the way back to 2001. My thoughts really haven't changed on the subject, although I might present the arguments a little differently. Anyway, this begins on post 25, and later in the thread I get into a debate over it with somebody named ksagnostic. Here it is:

I really don't know how to approach this situation or even if I should. I'm afraid that in my effort to explain myself, I'll end up saying even more things that will need explanation. I'm not even sure what it is you're not seeing. I'm going to try, though.

First, what is the difference between saying, "If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist," and saying, "If we don't believe God exists, objective moral values do not exist"? The difference lies in the fact that it's possible to believe something and be wrong. It's possible to believe God exists and yet God does not exist, and it's possible to believe God does not exist, and yet God exists. So if God and objective moral values exist, a person who does not believe in God can believe in objective moral values and be right. What I am saying is that it is possible to believe in objective moral values and to actually be moral without believing in God, but it is not possible to be moral if God does not exist because if God does not exist, then there are no objective moral values. If there are no objective moral values, then nobody is moral. I am not claiming that God's existence creates a moral authority. I am claiming that for objective moral values to exist, God's existence is necessary, but not necessarily sufficient. It's possible for God to exist and yet there are no objective moral values, but it's not possible for objective moral values to exist and yet there is no God.

I think if I explain what I mean by objective moral values, it should answer some of your other questions. In general, an objective truth claim is a claim about the object, and a subjective truth claim is a claim about the subject. I have a little thumb rule to help me tell the difference between a subjective truth claim and an objective truth claim.

If two statements that contradict each other can both be true, then the statements are subjective. If two statements that contradict each other cannot both be true, then the statements is objective.

Lemme give some examples. Take the two statements, "Ice cream tastes good," and "Ice cream tastes bad." These two statements contradict each other, but they can nevertheless both be true. Why? Because one statement is made by a person who likes ice cream, and the other statement is made about a person who does not like ice cream. Furthermore, the statements are not about the ice cream; the statements are about the tastes of the people making the claims. When a person says, "Ice cream tastes good," he's saying that he likes the way ice cream tastes. It's a subjective statement. The person making the claim is the subject, and the ice cream is the object.

Now take another two statements, "Blue Bell makes ice cream," and "Blue Bell does not make ice cream." These two statements are objective because they cannot both be true. No matter who makes the statements, they cannot be true because they are about the object, Blue Bell, and not the subjects making the claims.

Another test you can use to figure out whether a statement is objective or subjective is by asking whether or not it's possible for the statement to be false. You see, subjective statements can never be false; only objective statements can. That's why we think it's silly for people to argue over whether or not ice cream tastes good. There's no objective truth to it. One person likes it and the other doesn't. But it makes perfectly good sense for two people to argue over whether or not Blue Bell makes ice cream. Any argument two people have presupposes that there is some objective truth to the matter because if there is not, then the argument is pointless and silly.

So you see, claiming that people disagree on their moral views does not prove that there is no objective truth to the matter. In fact, it would be pointless for people to argue over a moral issue unless both parties agree that there is some objective truth to the matter. You can test yourself to see whether or not you think morality is objective or subjective by picking some moral position you feel very strong about and asking yourself if those who disagree with you are wrong. If you say they are wrong, then you believe in objective moral value. If all you can say is that they are different, but not wrong, then you probably do not believe in objective moral value. Furthermore, take whatever that moral position of yours is and ask yourself if it's possible for you to say, "A is right," and another person say, "A is wrong," and yet neither of you is incorrect. If you say that you cannot both be right, then you believe in objective moral value. If you say that you can both be right, then you do not believe in objective moral value.

Take rape for example. If I say "rape is wrong," and another person says, "rape is right," is it possible that neither of us is wrong? Is the statement about the act of rape, or is the statement about our personal preferences? If you say it's about rape, then you're a moral objectivist. If you say it's about our personal preferences, then you're a moral relativist. If it's about rape, then they cannot both be true. If it's about personal preferences, then they can both be true for the people making the claims.

I totally agree that if God doesn't exist, societies and individuals can nevertheless form moral standards to live by, but those moral standards would not be objective. You claim that societies and cultures determine right from wrong, which is a statement of moral relativism some call "society says" relativism.

Here's a question to consider, though: If societies set moral standards, what if two societies have moral standards that contradict one another? For example, what if one society says rape is right and the other society says rape is wrong? Can they both be right? If one of them is wrong, then there is some objective truth to the matter, and it is not determined by the beliefs of either society. That's the nature of objective truth claims. They are not determined by our beliefs because it's possible for us to believe things that aren't true.

If you believe the moral set by society are objective, then how do you deal with the fact that different societies contradict one another in their moral truth claims? More basic than that, though, what determines what the moral law of the society is? Does it depend on some guru the society invests with authority to make moral claims? What if some people in the society disagree? Are they wrong or just different? Does the majority rule?

Another thing to consider is that if the morals of societies are objective, that means moral revolutionaries, people we have historically considered heroes, are actually immoral people. Everybody who has tried to put an end to the values of their society were immoral people because they went against the morals of their society. That includes people like Martin Luther King Jr. It includes abolitionists. That's another thing to consider. Almost every society in history has had some form of slavery. Do we say they were wrong or just different?

If "society says" relativism is true, then there's no moral principle that transcends cultures, and therefore, there's no basis upon which to condemn moral atrocities in other societies. That was the argument the nazi's used during the Nuremberg trials. They were acting in accordance with the morals of their society. But you see, even they were inconsistent, because while claiming moral relativism, they were at the same time saying that those who were judging them were wrong. Moral relativists are often inconsistent. They'll say something like, "Stop pushing your morals on me," and you might ask, "Why?" Then they'll say, "Because everybody defines morality for themselves, so it's wrong for you to push your morals on other people." But do you see the contradiction there? First the person says that everybody defines morality for themselves, but in the same breath they claim it's wrong for one person to push their morality on somebody else, and they mean it's objectively wrong. You might want to respond with, "If it's wrong for one person to push their morality on somebody else, then why are you pushing that moral view of yours on me?" You see, the person who claims that morals are relative is trying to push their moral on the other person that it's wrong to push morals on other people. So it's almost impossible for moral relativists to live consistently with their views. That's why I really doubt that most people who claim moral relativism really are moral relativists. I think almost all people believe in objective moral values. It's just a matter of finding something they feel strongly about. That's why I asked you to think of something you feel strongly about - especially something you get emotional about. Then consider those who disagree with you and ask yourself if those people are wrong or merely different.

So if objective moral values exist, in other words if statements like, "rape is wrong," are objectively true, and if they are true even though some think they are false, then why is God's existence necessary? Why is it necessary for God to exist in order for objective moral values to exist? Why is it that if God does not exist, that objective moral values do not exist? This is one of those things that seems intuitively obvious to me, but is nevertheless hard to explain. It's like trying to prove that the law of non-contradiction is true. It's perfectly obvious and easy to see, but it's hard to make it clear to somebody else who doesn't see it. Having heard my explanation of what it means for moral values to be objectively true, you may already see it, but I'm going to try to explain it anyway.

A moral law is prescriptive. Rather than describing what is the case, moral laws prescribe what ought to be the case. They are imperatives that are in the form of a command. To say that something is right is to say that you ought to do it. You have an obligation or duty to do it. Feed your children. Likewise, to say it is wrong is to say that you ought not do it. You have an obligation or duty not to do it. Don't drown your children.

Whenever people have a moral disagreement with one another where each thinks the other has a moral obligation to behave in a particular way, there's a tendency for them to respond with the question, "Sez who?" This is a legitimate question. It's a challenge. The person asking the question is challenging the other person on their authority to make moral imperatives. He's saying, "Who are you to tell me what to do?" I think this challenge betrays an understanding on the part of the person making the challenge that without a legitimate authority there simply is no moral imperative. We're free to live autonomously. If no one "sez," then we have no moral obligation.

Morals have oughtness. Only persons impose duty and obligation on other persons, so there must be a personal being over us. Otherwise, there are no objective moral values. Without God, we are left with nihilism or relativism, both of which are forms of moral non-realism.

Moral oughtness implies purpose. There is a goal to which we are obligated to aspire, so our lives have purpose. The purpose of our lives is (at least in part) to obey moral imperatives. But for there to be purpose to our lives, there must be a personal being whose purpose it is for us to obey the moral laws.

But what kind of authority would be required for an imperative to be morally binding on us? Obviously, this authority must be higher than the government because we all have, at one point or another, a disagreement with what the law sez. We all think the law is wrong at some point. But the law can't be wrong if the government is a legitimate authority for deciding right and wrong. They would, by definition, always be right. So we see that things are not morally wrong simply because they are illegal, and they are not morally right simply because they are legal. If that were the case, then we'd all be immoral to ever try to change the law. Therefore, if there is an objective moral law, there must be a moral lawgiver whose authority is higher than that of any human government.

To say that something has meaning, value, or worth is to say that it means something to somebody, is valued by somebody, and that it's worth something to somebody. If there is no God, then whatever meaning and value we attribute to life is only relative. It only has meaning and value to us, but it has no objective or intrinsic meaning and value. Only persons ascribe meaning, value, and worth, so if people have intrinsic value and worth (meaning that we'd have value and worth whether other people cared about us or not and whether we cared about ourselves or not), then there must be a necessary transcendent personal being who invests us with value and worth.

Mormonism: What would Pascal say?

2011-12-23T14:07:00.003-05:00

This is not an argument against Mormonism. It's just an observation I thought was interesting.

Pascal argued that in a situation where a person was 50/50 on whether God exists or not, that the safer bet would be to believe God exists since you have much to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God, and you have much to lose and nothing to gain if you don't believe in God.

According to LDS theology, there are three levels of glory--the Celestial Kingdom, the Terrestrial Kingdom, and the Telestial Kingdom. The Celestial Kingdom is the highest kingdom, and that's the one Mormons shoot for. It allows them to progress and become more like the Father. But to get to the Celestial Kingdom, you have to "live the fullness of the gospel," which entails partaking of all the ordinances of the LDS Church.

The Terrestrial Kingdom and the Telestial Kingdom are for most everybody else. Hardly anybody goes to hell, or what Mormons call "perdition." The only way you can go to perdition according to LDS theology is if you absolutely know that Mormonism is true and you reject it anyway. So you've got to basically be visited by Jesus or an angel, or have some kind of experience like that that tells you beyond all doubt that it's true. But since most of us never get that kind of confirmation, we're in no danger of perdition. We're going to go either to the Terrestrial Kingdom or the Telestial Kingdom.

The Terrestrial and Telestial kingdoms are unimaginably better than this world. Those of us who are basically decent people, whether we are Christians, atheists, or whatever, will go to the Terrestrial Kingdom, which is a groovy place. All the rotten people (Hitler, etc.) go to the Telestial kingdom, and even they are going to experience a wonderful eternity there. It turns out that even some Mormons will go to the Terrestrial kingdom because you have to be married and have your marriage sealed for eternity before you can go to the Celestial kingdom. So Mormons who are in good standing and who live faithfully according to their religion will go to the Terrestrial kingdom as long as they remain single.

So let's suppose you're an ordinary protestant Christian trying to decide whether to convert to Mormonism or not. And let's suppose you're sitting on the fence. What would Pascal say?

Well, if conventional Christianity is true, and you believe in it, then you'll be saved. But if you convert to Mormonism, you'll suffer the wrath of God for your sins because the Mormon gospel is a false gospel that can't save. So if conventional Christianity is true, and you convert to Mormonism, you have a lot to lose.

But if Mormonism is true, and you don't convert to Mormonism, you're still going to spend an eternity in heavenly bliss. You're not in any danger of suffering the wrath of God. The only thing you lose out on is becoming a god and populating other worlds. If Mormonism is true, and you believe in it, you STILL may not ever become a god and populate other worlds. First, you have to tie the knot for eternity before you can go to the Celestial kingdom and progress to godhood. That seems like a high price to pay. But even if you get married for eternity and enter the Celestial Kingdom, it's not an easy road to godhood. Going to the Celestial Kingdom only gives you the opportunity to continue on the road of progression. It still takes a lot of effort once you get there.

So if you're happy with what conventional Christianity has to offer--an eternity of bliss free from sickness, suffering, and sorrow--then you might as well stick with that because if Mormonism happens to be true, that's what you're going to get in the Terrestrial kingdom anyway. There's little advantage to converting to Mormonism--especially if the idea of eternal marriage does not appeal to you, or if the idea of being responsible for a whole universe and billions of people does not appeal to you, or if you just happen to like coffee and Dr. Pepper.

Conversation With a Mormon Missionary

2011-12-16T12:45:00.004-05:00

I just went to mormon.org where you can chat live with a Mormon missionary, and I had the most interesting conversation with a nice girl named Melody. I thought you might be interested in listening in...

Agent [Melody] is ready to assist you.

Melody: Hi, I'm Melody
Melody: How are you today?

Me: Hi Melody.
Me: Sorry, I was looking at a different web page.

Melody: no worries. :)
Melody: how can I help?

Me: Okay, I got a visit from a couple of missionaries a couple of days ago...
Me: And I've been thinking about some of the things we talked about.
Me: And it has raised a question for me.

Melody: great! I'd love to help. :)

Me: When we were talking, I was asking them what distinguished them from other people who consider themselves Christians but who are not Mormons.
Me: I was wanting to know what advantage there was to becoming a Mormon instead of just remaining a Christian, assuming that Mormonism is true.

Melody: ok

Me: One of them started talking about different levels of glory.
Me: He showed me a book with an illustration of the Celstial Kingdom, the Terrestrial kingdom, and the Telestial kingdom.
Me: So my question is about the Celestial kingdom.
Me: Although I don't remember what all was said, I remember getting the impression that becoming a Mormon would be the first step toward eternal progression--becoming more like the Father.
Me: So my first question is this: Do you have to become a Mormon before you can enter the Celestial Kingdom?

Melody: that's a good question. A person has to believe in and live (the best they can) the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is taught in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints (mormon) and which church has been given authority from God to perform ordinances such as baptism.
Melody: Many people who are members of the church, but who aren't fully committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ won't enter the celestial kingdom,

Me: So, becoming a Mormon is part of living the fullness of the gospel?
Me: So it's possible to be a Mormon, but NOT enter the Celestial kingdom. Is that right?

Melody: "Mormon" is a nickname for members of the Church of Jesus christ of Latter-day saints.

Me: Yes, I understand that. That's how I'm using the word.

Melody: right, but that term would not have applied to the first Christians during Jesus's time, or the faithful members of God's church in Old testament times. That's why I feel like stressing that it is the part about obeying the fulness of the gospel, rather than being a "mormon".

Me: I like your name, by the way. I used to know a girl named Harmony. Wouldn't it be funny to have twin girls and name them Melody and Harmony?

Melody: :) good times.

Me: Oh, I see your point.

Melody: we believe that it's the same church, though

Me: Okay, wel for the sake of discussions, let's just assume that when we use the word "Mormon," we're referring to people who faithfully live out the gospel.
Me: That'll just make the dissuasion more simple, I think.

Melody: and we also believe that God will give all of His children the opportunity to learn the gospel, the fulness of the gospel and have the chance to accept or reject it before they are judged. So there are many people who will enter the celestial kingdom who didn't have the opportunity to join the church during their lifetimes.
Melody: sounds good. :)

Me: Yeah, we talked about that. They read me a passage in the Book of MOrmon that basically said if you hear the gospel int his life, you won't get a second chance in the after life. But if you never hear in this life, you'll get a chance in the after life. So everybody gets a chance, but they don't get two chances.

Melody: God will be fair. and He will judge our desires and our actions. :)

Me: But anyway, we're straying a little bit from where I wanted to go. Lemme ask you another question.

Melody: alright

Me: So, a person must live consistently with the fullness of the gospel to get to the Celestial kingdom...And only Mormons (though not all Mormons) live consistently with the fullness of the gospel (since only the LDS Church has the priesthood authority, etc.)...So, it seems to follow that you must convert to Mormonism (either in this life or the next) before you can go to the Celestial kingdom.
Me: Is that right so far?

Melody: I'd say that sounds pretty accurate. :)

Me: Hold on, I have to get my train of thought back. LOL I'm a little skater-brained.

Melody: no worries. take your time. :)

Me: Oh yeah. So, is going to the Celestial kingdom necessary for eternal progression? I other words, it is possible to go to one of the lesser kingdoms and still continue to progress in the afterlife?
Me: Scatter-brained, I meant.
Me: Or however you spell "Scatter"

Melody: hmm...that's a good question. I imagine that people in the lesser kingdoms will still be able to learn and grow in some ways, but they will be limited. They will not inherit a fulness of God's glory, so they won't be able to eternally progress.
Melody: no worries.

Me: I wish I knew a little more about what it means to eternally progress, but that would get us into a long discussion, probably. The way the missionaries put it, progression is all about becoming more and more like the Father.

Melody: exactly. let me see if I can find a verse that may help.

Me: Okay, so let's say that people in any kingdom can progress, but you have to go to the Celestial kingdom before you can progress all the way and become JUST LIKE the Father. Is that right?

Melody: 55 They are they into whose hands the Father has given aall things—

Me: What is this a verse from?

Melody:
58 Wherefore, as it is written, they are agods, even the bsons of cGod—
59 Wherefore, aall things are theirs, whether life or death, or things present, or things to come, all are theirs and they are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
60 And they shall aovercome all things.
61 Wherefore, let no man aglory in man, but rather let him bglory in God, who shall csubdue all enemies under his feet.
62 These shall adwell in the bpresence of God and his Christ forever and ever.
Melody: 69 These are they who are ajust men made bperfect through Jesus the mediator of the new ccovenant, who wrought out this perfect datonement through the shedding of his own eblood.
70 These are they whose bodies are acelestial, whose bglory is that of the csun, even the glory of God, the dhighest of all, whose glory the sun of the firmament is written of as being typical.
Melody: It's from Doctrine and Covenants section76
Melody: it's part of a revelation received by the prophet Joseph Smith

Me: Okay. I'll have a look at that later. I sometimes have to read things more than once before they sink in. But I have a copy of the D&C, so I can look at it.

Melody: I like analogies a lot, they help me to understand the concepts better. The kingdoms of Glory are compared to the Sun, the moon and the stars

Me: So, what other requirements are necessary to enter the Celestial Kingdom? Is it just living the full gospel? Or is there more?

Melody: and in 1 corinthians 15 we learn that we will be resurrected to different kinds of glory
Melody: I use this analogy to help correlate the two
Melody: when we are living the fulness of the gospel, our souls become full of light
Melody: but when we sin, or reject our faith, our souls can't hold as much light

Me: Yeah, I've heard the 1 corinthians 15 connection, but that isn't where this doctrine comes from, is it? I mean Paul talks there about celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies, but there's no mention of telestial bodies. So the Telestial kingdom must come from some other source.

Melody: not exactly. I don't know why Paul doesn't mention it. It is possible that consequent transcribers made a mistake and left it out, or that Paul had other reasons
Melody: but he does mention sun, moon and stars, as an analogy for the "brightness" of different kingdoms

Me: But is there another source in LDS scriptures that talks about this? I'm assuming there's a D&C somewhere that talks about these three separate kingdoms. I mean Paul doesn't even mention kingdoms. It sounds like he's just making an analogy between different heavenly bodies and the resurrection bodies.

Melody: right, because there is a correlation between the two. The judgment is not arbitrary. our actions have a direct consequence on the state of our souls, which consequences will be made obvious in our resurrected bodies
Melody: we are the greatest record of our lives
Melody: you know how sometimes you meet a person
Melody: and they are so good, you can just tell by looking at them?

Me: You mentioned earlier that baptism was part of living the fullness of the gospel and that there are other ordinances. Can you mention what other ordinances there are? You don't have to mention all of them if there are a lot. I'm just curious what a few others might be.

Melody: they shine a little

Me: I don't know if I can tell by LOOKING at somebody who good they are. I mean people thought Ted Bundy was a pretty swell chap. But you can tell by observing the way they behave. Is that what you mean?

Melody: I don't necessarily mean literally, and of course, people aren't perfect
Melody: I mean that some people seem to glow a little. They know who they are. they are confident, and happy. They have joy in their lives, even when things are hard.

Me: Yes, I've met people like that.

Melody: its kindof like that.

Me: Hmm.

Melody: and people who have had rough lives, who have committed all kinds of sin, they can seem like they are clouded by darkness
Melody: or a hardness

Me: Yeah, I see what you mean.
Me: It's like some people have an aura about them that you can sense when you're around them.

Melody: exactly. We will be the same person after we die--and I think that we'll still carry that "aura" with us.
Melody: does that make sense in terms of the resurrection and judgement?

Me: A little. It does raise a question, though. Are you saying the different kingdoms aren't actually different places or domains, but that they just represent different groupings of people--people who have different kinds of "aura's"?
Me: That's something else I've wondered about. Do people in different kingdoms mingle with each other? Do they all get to experience the presence of Christ? Or are they isolated from each other?

Melody: I think it's both. No unclean thing can dwell with God, so there will be a physical separation between God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and those who have rejected them. (That is why Christ can visit the terrestrial kingdom and the Holy Ghost can visit the telestial kingdom).

Me: When you say they can visit the kingdoms, it makes it sound like the kingdoms actually ARE different places, and not just a way of talking about different states of being.

Melody: that's why I said it was both. :)

Me: Okay. Did you see the question I asked about ordinances?
Me: If you didn't see it, I can ask again.

Melody: yes. Baptism is the first ordinance, along with receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost. Men are ordained to the priesthood. Temple ordinances follow in time, ceremonies called the initiatory, and the endowment. the sealing ordinance is the final ordinance, which seals a couple together for eternity, and their children to them so they can be a family unit in the eternities
Melody: (Also in the temple)

Me: Are these ordinances part of what it means to "live the fullness of the gospel"?

Melody: yes.

Me: So eternal marriage is part of living the fullness of the gospel?

Melody: right. However, God also understands the circumstances that we are in. Marriage is not always an opportunity for some people. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, all things that are unfair about our mortal lives may be made right. God will not deny eternal opportunities for those who sincerely follow Him.
Melody: basically, that means that if we dont' have the opportunity to get married in this life, God will give us the opportunity
Melody: to be sealed

Me: I'm not sure I'm following you. Are you saying that if a person lacks an opportunity to fulfill one of the ordinances of the gospel, that they can enter the Celestial kingdom even without living the fullness of the gospel?
Me: Oh, so you're saying that after death, we still have an opportunity to get married?

Melody: the ordinances of the gospel are step by step, line upon line. A person must be baptized to get the priesthood, and must have those before going to the temple.
Melody: God will make all things that are unfair about life fair in the eternities

Me: Does a person have to go through ALL of the ordinances before you can say they lived "the fullness of the gospel"? Or only some of the ordinances required?

Melody: that's a good question. It goes back to the fairness of God. He will judge us according to our faithfulness and the opportunities we were given. For example, suppose a young woman dies when she is 17. She has been baptized, and has been as faithful as she can be. She loves the Lord and desires to follow Him.
Melody: but she hasn't been through the temple because she's too young
Melody: God will make it fair for her
Melody: I don't know all of what that means,
Melody: but I do know that god will deny none of His children who love Him and want to be faithful
Melody: and he will provide a way

Me: When you say God will make it fair for her, does that mean God will treat her as if she had gone through all the ordinances, or does that mean God will give her the chances to perform the ordinances in the afterlife?
Me: Okay, I'm with you.

Melody: or provide a way for those who are on earth to do the work vicariously for her
Melody: that is why we do work for the dead

Me: Well, let me ask you another hypothetical question, and if you need to speculate, that's okay. Or if you just want to say, "I don't know," that's okay, too.

Melody: ok

Me: Let's say you're a Mormon, and you go to a church where there aren't a lot of other singles...
Me: But there's one single girl who really digs you, but you don't dig her that much.
Me: And let's say that this girl would marry you if she had the chance. That means YOU have the opportunity to get married. But you choose not to.
Me: Would that satisfy God's fairness? If you don't marry this girl, and if she was your only chance, does that mean you won't enter the celestial kingdom? After all, at that point, God could say, "I gave you the chance to get married, and you chose not to."

Melody: that's a good question. It all goes back to the Atonement of Jesus Christ. We are to do our best, and He will make the "rest" possible. As for this hypothetical young man and woman, it depends. Did he try? Did he seek the Lord's counsel through prayer and scripture study on the subject? Did he choose to not pursue a relationship with this woman because he honestly felt that he couldn't honestly have a relationship with her? or did he not because he just didn't really feel like it? There is a bit of a difference between someone who never finds the right person, and those who let opportunities pass by.
Melody: God teaches us to be honest in our dealings with our fellow men. I think it would have been much worse if the young man had married her dishonestly, saying that he loved and was committed to her when his heart wasn't in it

Me: In this scenario, let's say there's nothing really wrong with the girl. She's a descent person, a faithful Mormon, etc. The guy just isn't the least bit interested in her. Either he's not attracted to her, or he's gay, or he prefers being single, or whatever.

Melody: And again, God understands our hearts and our limitations.

Me: Does that mean God will treat the person as if he had gotten married and let him go to the Celestial kingdom?

Melody: Not exactly, because God is not a hypocrite. He teaches honesty because He is perfectly honest. But through the atonement of Jesus Christ, He can provide opportunities to His children to reconcile themselves

Me: Or does it mean that some way or some how, God will see to it that you will meet somebody you WOULD want to marry and who WOULD want to marry you, either this life or the next?

Melody: I'm not really sure how it works, but I imagine that it would be something akin to the latter.

Me: So, if a person decided to join the Mormon church, was beginning to get old, and was beginning to despair that he'd never find somebody suitable to marry, he shouldn't suffer any anxiety about not making it to the Celestial kingdom since God will give that person more opportunity in the afterlife?

Melody: exactly. let me quote one of our current apostles on the subject:
Melody: But what of the many mature members of the Church who are not married? Through no failing of their own, they deal with the trials of life alone. Be we all reminded that, in the Lord’s own way and time, no blessings will be withheld from His faithful Saints.32 The Lord will judge and reward each individual according to heartfelt desire as well as deed
Melody: from:
Melody: http://lds.org/general-conference/2008/10/celestial-marriage?lang=eng&query=celestial+marriage

Me: That makes it sound like marriage isn't even necessary to go to the Celestial kingdom, unless I'm misunderstanding him.

Melody: I think you're misunderstanding him. :)
Melody: it's because they are not married "through no failing of their own"

Me: Melody, let's say a faithful Mormon dies single, and he has to find somebody in the afterlife to marry if he wants to eternally progress...
Me: Between the time he dies and the time he marries, will he be able to hang out in the Celestial kingdom, or must he stay in one of the other kingdoms until he finds said wife and gets married?

Melody: neither. When we die, our spirits go to a place called "the spirit world." it is like a waiting room for the resurrection. All such things will be resolved before the resurrection. Again, I don't know how it works, because God hasn't revealed all things to us, but we do believe that sometime in the future, when we need to know, He will teach us.

Me: So all the ordinances have to take place while in the spirit world before the resurrection?

Melody: right. the final judgment is final
Melody: and that happens after we are resurrected

Me: That's why you have proxy baptisms?

Melody: exactly!

Me: Is there such a thing as a proxy marriage?

Melody: yes. we do perform proxy sealings

Me: INtersing.

Melody: :)

Me: Does a couple have to be married here on earth before they can have a proxy sealing?
Me: Like say two people get engaged, and one of them goes off to war and dies in battle. Can they be sealed?

Melody: that is typically how it works--we seal deceased married couples. If there are exceptions, they have to be approved by church leaders.

Me: Or what if only one of them has died?

Melody: I'm not sure
Melody: I think it would still require special permission

Me: That's an interesting question because what if there's a Mormon couple, and one of them wants to be sealed for eternity, and the other doesn't. The one who doesn't, dies. Then, the one who does has a proxy sealing. So the one who doesn't, doesn't have a choice. LOL
Me: It's like an eternal shotgun wedding.

Melody: oh, there's always a choice. work that is done for the dead can be accepted or rejected by the individuals that it is done for. :)

Me: Oh, I see. I'm sure that's a relief for some people.

Melody: I'm sure it is! haha...

Me: Give me a second to think. I think you've answered all my questions, but give me a second.

Melody: no worries. I'm in no rush.

Me: Okay, so let's say Jesus is going to return tomorrow, and I still haven't found somebody to marry. And I get in a car accident and die today. That leaves me one night in the afterlife to find somebody to marry for eternity, because once Jesus returns and the resurrection happens, my chance is over. Does mean if I don't married within that short amount of time, I have no chance of ever going to the Celestial Kingdom and becoming just like the Father?

Melody: not exactly. You are right that there will be many who are resurrected when christ comes again, however, not all people are resurrected at the same time. If God is merciful and just, He will give His children what they need.

Me: Oh, I see! That is very interesting.
Me: So, God could leave us in the spirit world indefinitely to give us time to perform the ordinances, right?
Me: Which means there is no one judgment day. There's different judgement days for different people depending on when they are resurrected.

Melody: not indefinitely, since ordinances (and proxy ones) require living people who have bodies
Melody: God will give you what you need

Me: Body those who are resurrected are living people with bodies, right?
Me: Body = but

Melody: :)
Melody: yes, however, while God is fair, there aren't loopholes

Me: I'm curious if people who have been resurrected and who live in the Celestial kingdom are able to perform proxy ordinances on those who are still in the spirit world and haven't been resurrected yet.

Melody: I don't think so

Me: OKay, well this has been really interesting, Melody, and I appreciate your time.

Melody: I'm glad we were able to chat today! you had some tough questions!

Me: In case you're interested, the reason I'm asking these questions is because I'm wondering if it's worth it to even look into Mormonism.

Melody: what do you mean?

Me: Okay, lemme explain.
Me: Let's say that Mormonism is true in everything it asserts.
Me: And let's say that I never get married.
Me: That would mean that if I convert to Mormonism, I'm really no better off than if I don't convert to Mormonism. Because from what I understand, as long as somebody is a fairly decent person (especially if they're a Christian attempting to follow Christ), then they will probably go to the Terrestrial Kingdom. But that's exactly where I'd go if I became a faithful Mormon and never got married. So if I'm never going to get married,it doesn't really matter for all practical purposes whether I ever convert to Mormonism or not. And if it doesn't matter, there's no point in expending a lot of effort in trying to find out if Mormonism is true.

Melody: ok. let me explain something to you really quick. because it doesn't seem like you've been understanding
Melody: 23 For we labor diligently to write, to apersuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by bgrace that we are saved, after all we can cdo.
Melody: if you accept the fulness of the gospel, and live it to the best of your ability, you will enter the celestial kingdom. period.
Melody: marriage in this life or not
Melody: the point is that you have to do the best you can

Me: Melody, i question whether anybody, Mormon or not, ever lives the fullness of the gospel to the best of their ability. We're all lazy from time to time. We all slack off.

Melody: yes, and then we can repent of our sins and be forgiven
Melody: that is why we need Jesus christ
Melody: Don't make the mistake that so many christians and mormons make in underestimating or undervaluing the saving power of JEsus Christ

Me: But if you must live to the best of your ability, then a person who slacks off can't go to the celestial kingdom simply because they haven't met the requirement. They actually have NOT lived to the best of their ability.

Melody: no. the best of your ability means that you do the best you can, and when you mess up, you do your best to repent and move forward
Melody: we aren't going to be perfect

Me: So you don't think anybody has the ability to be perfect?

Melody: Jesus christ was the only person to live a sinless life

Me: Let me back up. You said earlier: "if you accept the fullness of the gospel, and live it to the best of your ability, you will enter the celestial kingdom. period. marriage in this life or not. the point is that you have to do the best you can."

Melody: yes

Me: But you're not saying here that a person who tries but fails to get married will still be able to enter the celestial kingdom, are you?

Melody: I'm not sure I understand the question

Me: AFter all, I'm sure I could be trying a lot harder. I could be proposing to every woman I met. I could be breaking out the charm. So I'm not giving my best effort. I'm not doing all I can do.

Melody: haha. I don't think that's what it means. :)

Me: Well, you said as long as we do our best, we'll make it to the celestial kingdom. My question is: What if I do my best to get married, but fail. Will i make it to the celestial kingdom anyway?

Melody: ok. let me simplify everything that I've already said.
Melody: we are on this earth to do our best
Melody: we have to have faith in God and in Jesus Christ
Melody: we must desire to follow them above all else
Melody: "We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel." Articles of Faith

Me: Melody, can you hang on? I've got to use the bathroom. I'll be right back.

Melody: "We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost." Articles of Faith
Melody: ok. sounds good.
Melody: just read what I'm writing in the meantime

Me: Okay, I'm back.
Me: Thanks for waiting.

Melody: basically, that means that living the gospel means that we have Faith in Jesus Christ and His atonement, we continually repent of our sins, receive the ordinances of baptism, and the gift of the holy ghost. this is what it takes to enter the celestial kingdom. We can do that much. If we create excuses for ourselves, then we are lying to ourselves.
Melody: Now, there is something else that you should know. There are levels, or degrees of the celestial kingdom. Those individuals who are faithful, but reject the opportunity to become married, (in the spirit world or whatever) will enter into the celestial kingdom, but will not progress eternally with their spouse.
Melody:
1 In the acelestial glory there are three bheavens or degrees;
2 And in order to obtain the ahighest, a man must enter into this border of the cpriesthood [meaning the new and deverlasting covenant of emarriage];
3 And if he does not, he cannot obtain it.
4 He may enter into the other, but that is the end of his kingdom; he cannot have an aincrease. (doctrine and covenants 131)

Me: Intersting. I hadn't heard that before.

Melody: that's because we're getting into deeper doctrine, that we don't typically go into on mormon.org
Melody: we like to keep things simple

Me: Is it possible to be married in the Celestial kingdom and for one person to progress but not the other?

Melody: no. after the resurrection, everything is final. all such issues will be resolved before

Me: Progression isn't automatic, though, is it? I mean isn't there more a person has to do while in the Celstial kingdom to progress?

Melody: I would encourage you to start at the basics, and work up, this is really deep, and too much speculation on deep topics without an understanding of the basics is dangerous because it leads people to "look beyond the mark"
Melody: right

Me: Okay. Well thanks, Melody. Is there anything else you want to talk about before we go?

Melody: if you are interested in learning more about eternal marriage, I would encourage you to check out the link I gave earlier, for the quote by Elder Nelson
Melody: or visit lds.org
Melody: I hope that helps!

Me: Okay. Well, hopefully the missionaries will come back. I gave them my number.
Me: You've been very helpful. Thank you very much.

Melody: that's great! I hope they come by soon!
Melody: sure thing! I've really enjoyed chatting with you!

Me: Have a nice day, and Merry Christmas!

Melody: Merry Christmas to you too!

The Westminister Confession and double predestination

2011-12-14T12:33:00.004-05:00

I am sometimes surprised by how many Calvinists will affirm the Westminister Confession while denying double predestination. Double predestination seems to follow inescapably from the Westminister's Confession that "God from all eternity, did, by the most wise and holy counsel of His own will, freely, and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass."

1. God ordains whatever comes to pass.
2. The damnation of some people comes to pass.
3. Therefore, God ordains the damnation of some people.

How can you escape that? The only thing I can think of is for a Calvinist to argue that there's a difference between God ordaining things to come to pass and God predestining things to come to pass. I get the impression that there's no difference, but maybe I'm wrong.

Is God really all that?

2011-12-02T12:19:00.003-05:00

I still check out Yahoo Answers sometimes. There's a lot of villagers on Yahoo Answers, but since most people fall under that category or come up with the same kinds of objections to Christianity, we can't just ignore them. We can't just focus our attention on intellectual people or scholars.

I want to say something about a pattern I've noticed. A lot of questions on Yahoo Answers are something to the effect of "If God is all-something, then why this or that?" These questions are posed as challenges to Christians. When the Christians answer, they never seem to take issue with God being all-something. They granted it, then try to reconcile it with "this or that."

But I find myself questioning that God really is all-anything. One question that came up today started off, "If God is all-forgiving..." It sounds pious to say that God is all-forgiving, but I don't think it's accurate. Matthew 12:31 says that God will never forgive blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. So he's not all-forgiving in the sense that he will forgive all sin. He's also not forgiving in the sense that he will forgive all people (unless you're a universalist). He's going to send some people to hell as punishment for their sins.

So I don't think we can just arbitrarily stick an "all" in front of any of God's attributes and expect to arrive at sound theology. I think it's accurate to say that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, but I don't think it's accurate to say that God is all forgiving or even all loving.

Review: Redeeming Halloween by Kim Wier and Pam McCune

2011-10-28T12:10:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, a friend of mine wanted me to read Redeeming Halloween: Celebrating Without Selling Out by Kim Wier and Pam McCune, then to tell her what I thought of it. I figured since it's close to Halloween, and I need some fodder to blog on, I'd post the email I sent my friend. Here ye go...

I just finished reading "Redeeming Halloween," and thought I'd share my thoughts with you while they're fresh on my mind. I'm not going to go into much detail, because to be honest with you, I'm not all that interested in this subject. Of course I love Halloween. I mean I'm not all that interested in the subject of Halloween as a controversy among evangelicals.

I think the authors hit the nail on the head in the beginning where they talked about how Christians either feel guilty about celebrating Halloween, or they dread the reaction of their Christian friends, or they just don't celebrate it. As for me, I've never felt any guilt about Halloween, but I have sometimes dreaded the reaction of other Christians. I remember Amy (my ex-girlfriend) and I went to a Baptist church one Halloween and were treated kind of rudely because of how we were dressed. I was dressed as the grim reaper, and at Sylvania Baptist Church, "We don't glorify the devil." That's one of the things I don't like about Baptists--they major in the minors. I mean they make a big deal about what seem to me to be trivial issues.

I thought the authors had a lot of really creative and neat ideas for activities on Halloween. As the book progressed, though, the ideas seemed to have less and less to do with anything particularly Halloweenish. You know what I mean? I mean they were the sort of activities people might do in a child's Sunday school class any time during the year.

In the beginning of the book, the authors talked about the origins of Halloween, and how it was originally a Christian celebration of the martyrs. I wondered if the rest of the book would be an attempt to restore that original celebration, but it wasn't. The authors didn't say anything at all about how Halloween was originally celebrated. Then, they took activities, such as dressing up, going trick or treating, and carving pumpkins, which had nothing to do with the original Halloween, and showed how we could sanitize them by pouring Christian significance into them, i.e. dressing up as people groups who needed salvation. It made me wonder what the point was in going through the history of Halloween. The rest of the book seem to make the origins of Halloween irrelevant.

This is the way I look at it. If the activities themselves can be sanitized by pouring Christian meanings into them, then there's nothing inherently wrong with the activities. I mean you can't sanitize something that is truly wrong. For example, you can't make adultery right just by pouring some Christian significance into it. So if it's possible to sanitize an activity, then there's nothing inherently wrong with the activity. And if there's nothing inherently wrong with the activity, then it doesn't need to be sanitized. Maybe at some point in the past people did pour sinister meanings into activities, such as trick or treating. But these days in our culture, Halloween is a meaningless holiday, and trick-or-treating and dressing up is done for pure fun with no meaning--good or sinister--behind it. So while I see nothing wrong with a person wanting to pour Christian significance into Halloween activities, I see no need for it either.

As for me, I'm not really big on celebrations at all. I'm not a big fan of birthday parties or Christmas celebrations. I mean I like Christmas. I like Christmas trees and getting together with family to eat and socialize, but I'm not really big on gift exchanging, birthday cakes, and things like that. I think gift-exchanging causes people more stress than it's worth. The pay off just isn't worth it. But I like Halloween because it's the one time in the year where it's socially eacceptable (except among some evangelicals) to pretend to be something you're not. It's just good meaningless fun, and that's all I want it to be. I'm afraid if I felt the need to engage in so much meaningful activity on Halloween as they suggest in this book, it would suck the fun right out of Halloween for me. But that's just me. I see this sort of thing as a matter of personal preference. It's a Romans 14 situation.

Here's a couple of other things to look at:

Fall Festivals by Sam I Am

Thank God for Halloween by John Mark Reynolds

Faster than the speed of light

2011-09-23T11:28:00.003-04:00

By now, you've heard about the physicists in Europe who measured the speed of some neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. There are lots of articles I could've linked to, but this one mentions time travel, and I want to talk about that.

Somebody on facebook asked if it had any implications for arguments for the existence of God. I'm not qualified to answer that question, so I'm going to answer it. That's just the way I roll. I'm a blogger.

Up until now, the word on the streets has been that it's impossible for anything to move faster than the speed of light. There are good reasons for this, which I have read in physics books and which I can't explain from memory. I've glossed over some non-academic and unreliable sources on the internet that say that if it's possible for something to move faster than the speed of light, then time travel is possible. That's what the article seems to be saying that I linked to above. If that's so, then it could spell disaster for the kalam cosmological argument. Lemme explain.

The kalam cosmological argument depends on the A theory of time (i.e. the tensed theory, the dynamic theory, etc.). Backward time travel is not possible on the A theory of time because there's no past to travel back to. Backward time travel is only possible on the B theory of time (i.e. the tenseless theory, the static theory, etc.). So if backward time travel is possible, then the B theory must be true. And if the B theory is true, then the kalam cosmological argument is not sound.

But one could argue backwards. If backward time travel were possible, then it would result in all kinds of paradoxes. But paradoxes like those that would result from backward time travel are not really possible, which means that backward time travel is not possible. But backward time travel WOULD be possible if the B theory of time were correct. Since backward time travel is not possible, the B theory of time cannot be correct. So the kalam cosmological argument could still be sound. One could go on to argue that if neutrinos could move faster than the speed of light, then time travel would be possible, but since time travel is not possible, neutrinos cannot move faster than the speed of light.

Physics. It messes with your head. It'll be interesting to see what happens, 'cause you know this experiment is going to have to be repeated.

Craig, Dawkins, Loftus, and sometimes White

2011-09-01T12:07:00.002-04:00

John Loftus wants to debate William Lane Craig, but Craig won't debate Loftus for what seem to Loftus to be lame reasons. William Lane Craig wants to debate Richard Dawkins, but Dawkins won't debate Craig for what probably seem to Craig to be lame reasons. So here's my solution. I think Loftus should approach Dawkins and say, "Hey, I want to debate Craig, but he won't debate me, and Craig wants to debate you, but you won't debate him. So let's go talk to Craig and say, 'Bill, we have a proposal for you. Dawkins will agree to debate you if you will agree to debate Loftus. That's fair, isn't it?'"

Maybe we can find some way to work James White into it as well, because White would like to debate Craig on Molinism. Craig doesn't debate his fellow Christians, though. He debated Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan who both consider themselves to be Christians, but I guess Craig doesn't consider them to be real Christians. I wonder if Craig would ever debate a Mormon. Considering the fact that he contributed a chapter to The New Mormon Challenge, which was subsequently responded to by Blake Ostler, he ought to be willing to debate a Mormon. And considering how many times Craig has attacked Calvinism, it seems like he ought to be willing to debate the issue.

White would also like to debate Norman Geisler. Why aren't deals being made? Surely we just need to find the right incentive to make these debates happen. I don't think Geisler will debate anybody, though. I saw his debate with Ferrell Till a long time ago, and it did not go well for Geisler. I don't think Geisler is cut out for debating.

Personally, I would love to debate Bill Craig. Even though I'd probably get stomped, Craig is a nice fellow, and it would probably be really interesting and fun. Plus, Craig is always crystal clear, which I think would make him an ideal debating partner. I hate having to struggle to understand what somebody is saying. I'd hate to debate James White, though. James White would probably just want to make me look stupid. And since he has such an unpleasant and abrasive personality, I don't think I'd enjoy debating him even if I was the winner. I'm not sure I'd want to debate Dawkins for the same reason. Dawkins is rude and condescending, and I can't stand people like that. Just reading his anti-Christian diatribes is like fingernails down a chalkboard to me. It seems like if he really wants to rescue Christians from their ignorance, he wouldn't write that way. It makes people lose interest in his arguments and not even want to read them.

RE: God is Impossible: A Final Proof

2011-08-18T00:51:00.006-04:00

I saw this video on youtube recently. This is Kathleen King presenting an argument she got from Lynne Atwater, who she says is a clinical psychologist. It's an attempt to demonstrate that God doesn't exist by pointing out a contradiction in the notion of God. Although Kathleen claims that the argument uses "simple deductive logic," she doesn't actually present her arguments in tidy syllogisms so that we can see the deduction clearly. I'm going to attempt to put her arguments into syllogisms. I realize I risk being accused of misrepresenting her argument by doing this, but I'm going to do the best I can. This is essentially what the argument is:

1. If creation is impossible, God's existence is impossible.
2. Creation is impossible.
3. Therefore, God's existence is impossible.

Of course this is a logically valid syllogism, so the only question is whether these premises are true. So let's look at how she defends them.

1. If creation is impossible, God's existence is impossible.

She bases this premise on her definition of God, which she gets from Webster's dictionary, and which says that God is "the creator and ruler of the universe." So this is her argument:

1.1 If creation is impossible, then it's impossible for the universe to be created.
1.2 If it's impossible for the universe to be created, then it's impossible for the creator of the universe to exist.
1.3 If it's impossible for the creator of the universe to exist, then God's existence is impossible.
1.4 Therefore, if creation is impossible, then God's existence is impossible.

That's about as tidy as I can make her argument, and hopefully she won't object to this characterization. Now let's discuss these premises.

1.1 If creation is impossible, then it's impossible for the universe to be created.

This is obviously true, and I hope nobody reading this needs me to explain why.

1.2 If it's impossible for the universe to be created, then it's impossible for the creator of the universe to exist.

There is an imprecision in this premise that I'm going to let slide because the imprecision will come up again when I talk about the next premise. For now, let's assume for the sake of argument that this premise is true.

1.3 If it's impossible for the creator of the universe to exist, then God's existence is impossible.

This premise is based on her definition of God as "the creator and ruler of the universe." The truth of this premise depends on the definition being an identity statement. If "God" and "the creator of the universe" are identical, then if one doesn't exist, the other doesn't exist. When we say that "God is the creator of the universe," we must be using the is of identity for her premise to be true.

But this dictionary definition is not using the is of identity. Rather, it's using the is of predication. That God created the universe is not an essential attribute of God. After all, in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theism, God did not need the universe to exist. He could have refrained from creating the universe. In some characterizations, God actually existed before the universe existed. If God existed before the universe existed, then he obviously couldn't have been defined as "the creator of the universe." He became the creator of the universe subsequent to creation. The fact that God created the universe is just something that happens to be true of God. So, when Kathleen says, "Without creation, God can't exist," she's obviously not talking about the Jewish, Christian, or Muslim God.

I know a lot of people will disagree with what I'm saying here. Some of my fellow Christian apologists (like Greg Koukl and Brett Kunkle of STR) argue that Yahweh and Allah cannot be the same God since different properties are attributed to each of them. Using the indiscernibility of identicals, they argue that since there are things that are true of Allah that are not true of Yahweh, and vice versa, that Allah and Yahweh cannot be the same God.

But I have maintained that there is a flaw in such reasoning. After all, Calvinists and Arminians believe different things about God, but that doesn't mean the God of the Calvinists and the God of the Arminians are different Gods altogether. All it means is that one or both of them are wrong about what they believe about God. In the same way, it seems at least possible that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, but just believe different things about him. I called Greg's radio show one time and pressed him on this point (October 24, 2010). After giving me his argument from the indiscernibility of identicals, I asked him if he would apply the same principle to the Jews. After all, the Jews believe in a unitarian God, whereas we believe in a trinitarian God. Does that mean Jews and Christians worship different Gods? Greg made an exception in their case and said we worship the same God, but that Jews are just mistaken to say that God is only one person. But couldn't we just say that the Muslims are mistaken in what they attribute to God? Greg and I did not resolve our differences (and as an aside, I'm agnostic on the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God).

In the same way, it's possible that God exists, but that we are mistaken to attribute creation to him. So premise 1.3 cannot be accepted without some qualification. For those who think it is appropriate to apply the indiscernibility of identicals to distinguish between different gods of different belief systems, you may find premise 1.3 to be true without qualification. But if you do, please be aware of the difficulties that is going to cause you.

Since there is room for debate here, I'm just going to say that premise 1 may or may not be true. My primary problem with this argument is premise 2, which I will discuss presently.

2. Creation is impossible.

This is the crux of Kathleen's argument, and it's also the weakest link in the argument. The reason Kathleen thinks creation is impossible is because it entails a logical contradiction. Actually, she infers two contradictions from the notion of creation.

The first contradiction comes from the fact that creation entails something coming from nothing. The second contradiction comes from the fact that if the universe came into existence out of nothing, then not even God existed before creation. Let's take them one at a time.

The first contradiction

Creation entails something coming into existence out of nothing, which Kathleen thinks entails a contradiction.

Let me make a digression here and explain what a contradiction is. A contradiction is when one claim is the negation of another claim. The claim that "My cat is pregnant" contradicts the claim that "My cat is not pregnant." But there's more. Before these two claims can really be contradictory, they must be talking about the same cat at the same time and in the same sense. After all, I've got two cats. If "My cat" in the first sentence referred to Psyche, and "My cat" in the second sentence referred to Aristotle, then the statements would not really be contradicting each other. Or, if I uttered one statement while Psyche was pregnant, and I uttered the other statement right after she gave birth to all her kittens, the statements would not contradict each other. Or, if I meant "pregnant" in a literal sense in the first statement but a metaphorical sense in the second statement, then the statements do not contradict each other. To have a genuine contradiction, you have to be talking about the same thing at the same time and in the same sense. This is important because it has a bearing on the soundness of Kathleen's argument.

With that in mind, how is it that the notion of something coming out of nothing entails a contradiction? Kathleen doesn't tell us explicitly what the two propositions are that supposedly contradict each other, but you can kind of guess from the illustration she uses. In the illustration, she says that she has a house that is completely empty. Then she says,"If you really need something, I could go inside my house and get it for you." She thinks that would be contradictory because "the definition of my house would be both true and false at the same time." There's a caption on the video that says, "nothing =/= something."

Apparently, these are the two statements she thinks are contradictory:

2.1 There is nothing in my house.
2.2 There is something in my house.

Now, remember the explanation above of what a contradiction is. Before these two claims can contradict each other, they must be talking about the same thing at the same time and in the same sense. If I went into the empty house, created something out of nothing, then came out of the house with the thing I just created, then it will have been true that "There is nothing in my house" and that "There is something in my house," but both statements would not have been true at the same time. So there would be no contradiction.

Kathleen claims that the creation of the universe from nothing would be just like saying you could get something out of her empty house. If there's nothing in the house to get, then you can't get something out of the house. In the same way, the universe can't come into existence out of nothing.

The problem with Kathleen's argument should be immediately obvious, even to her. She says in her video that "Creation can't be two opposite things at the same time" [the emphasis is my own]. She's absolutely right. By the law of non-contradiction, the universe can't both exist and not exist at the same time. But, of course, nobody who claims that the universe was created is under the impression that the universe existed and didn't exist at the same time. The Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo does not entail any contradiction because it doesn't claim that "Nothing exists" and that "Something exists," at the same time as Kathleen's video portrays it. There is no contradiction. Creation ex nihilo is simply the idea that God brought the universe into existence without the use of pre-existing material. I'll say more about that next.

The second contradiction

The second contradiction comes from the fact that creation out of nothing entails that not even God existed before creation. But God would have to exist if he is to create anything. So here is the contradiction (as far as I can see):

2.3 God existed before creation.
2.4 God did not exist before creation.

The problem with Kathleen's argument is simply that she is confused about what creation out of nothing means. It doesn't mean that nothing at all existed before creation. All it means is that what came into existence did not come into existence out of pre-existing material. If God were to create a red rubber ball right now without using any material that is already in existence, that would be an example of creation ex nihilo even though the whole universe already exists. It would differ from what Kathleen refers to as "transformation." When Christians say that God created the universe out of nothing, they do not mean that the universe came into existence without a cause.

It may help Kathleen to understand the distinction between a material cause and an efficient cause. A material cause is the material out of which an object is made. An efficient cause is the thing that brings about change or motion. If somebody made a longbow out of a tree, the tree would be the material cause of the bow, and the person would be the efficient cause of the bow. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo is that the universe has an efficient cause, but it does not have a material cause. So creation out of nothing does not entail that God wasn't around to create the universe.

The crux of Kathleen's argument is that creation is impossible since it violates the law of non-contradiction. But Kathleen's argument fails because she has not demonstrated any contradiction. Without that crucial premise, Kathleen's argument against the existence of God fails.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause to its existence

2011-08-02T11:25:00.002-04:00

The Kalam Cosmological Argument begins like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause to its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause to its existence.

Today, I want to respond to two objections I hear frequently to the first premise.

Objection #1: The first premise equivocates on the phrase "begins to exist." In all of our experience, we only witness things coming into existence in the sense that matter or energy is restructured in some way. My car is made up of pre-existing material. The material that I am made of came out of star dust billions of years ago. When something comes into existence in this sense, our uniform experience tells us that there is always a cause. But when the Kalam argument uses the phrase "begins to exist" it isn't talking about the universe being made out of pre-existing material. It's talking about all the material of the universe coming into existence from nothing. Since we have no experience of anything coming into existence from nothing, we are not in a position to say whether it would require a cause or not.

Answer #1: My biggest problem with this objection is that it assumes our knowledge of causation is based on experience. I think that is a mistake. As David Hume pointed out, all we ever witness is contiguity in space and time. We don't actually witness causation. We assume causation when we witness contiguity in space and time. I think our knowledge of causation is a rational intuition. I know for a certainty that something cannot come into existence out of nothing without a cause, but my knowledge isn't based on anything I've experienced.

Objection #2: Some things do come into existence uncaused out of nothing. Pair production is an example. Electrons and positrons spontaneously pop in and out of existence. The universe could have, too.

Answer #2: When electron/positron pairs pop in and out of existence, they don't do so from and to absolute nothingness. Electron/positron pairs are produced from pre-existing material, namely gammas. And when they annihilate each other, they are converted back into gammas. So pair production and annihilation does not provide a counter-example to the principle that something cannot come into existence uncaused out of nothing.

Are you here to convert me?

2011-07-20T22:52:00.003-04:00

I have a suggestion. If somebody accuses you of trying to win converts or asks you if you are trying to convert them, don't say anything like, "I'm not trying to convert you. I can't convert anybody. Only the Holy Spirit can convert you (or only you can choose to convert)." I've talked to a lot of Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, and every time I ask them what their intentions are, why they come to my house, and what they're trying to accomplish, and whether they are trying to convert me, they all give me a variation of that response. The reason I suggest not giving that response is because it comes across as disingenuous. I always strive to be straight forward and honest with people, and I expect the same from them. Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are not going door to door for nothing. Their hope--their goal--is that you convert. And they think them being there to talk to you will have something to do with your conversion. Otherwise, there'd be no reason for them to witness to you. And when you witness to others or use apologetics, the purpose is to cause them to change their minds and convert. Just be honest about it. It doesn't mean you have to change your theology. Of course the Holy Spirit has to change a person's heart, but if we ambassadors were irrelevant to the process, Jesus never would've sent us out. It is not impious to say that the reason you are sharing your faith with somebody or offering arguments for your faith is in the hope that they will convert. And if that is your hope, then you are trying to convert them. Just be honest about it. I would have a lot more respect for Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses if they were just honest with me about their intentions.

The persuasive power of arguments in a presuppositional apologetic

2011-07-07T15:57:00.004-04:00

Calvinists, and especially presuppositionalists, often make what seems to me to be inconsistent statements. They say that arguments do not persuade, and the job of an apologist is not to persuade since only the Holy Spirit changing a person's heart can cause that person to be converted. The motive for using apologetics is simply obedience to the great commission and 1 Peter 3:15.

But then, on the other hand, they say in God's sovereignty, he uses means to accomplish his ends. In some cases, his end is to save somebody.

With that being the case, why couldn't arguments be among the means that God uses to convert people? If so, then arguments do persuade. If arguments can have no persuasive power, then they cannot be among the means God uses to convert people. If presuppositional Calvinists really believe God uses means to bring people to salvation, why do they exclude arguments from among those means? If he uses arguments as his means, then arguments persuade.

The Hallucination Hypothesis

2011-06-16T20:37:00.011-04:00

For several years now, I've been wanting to write a series of blogs where the first half of the series argued that Jesus considered himself to be the Jewish messiah and the second half of the series argued that Jesus was raised from the dead. I read so much on the subject and had so many thoughts on it that my stack of notes became formidable, which made it difficult for me to muster the enthusiasm to finally write it all down. So I've been putting off blogging about little pieces of the puzzle individually because I thought I'd eventually write this whole series. Well, since it's been so many years and I have nothing to show for it, I thought I'd go ahead and start blogging on some of the pieces. For all I know, I may never write the whole series, and I hate for that bee in my bonnet to keep buzzing around.

I'm pretty convinced that the apostles saw what they took to be a living breathing Jesus some time after he had died. I think that is a really good explanation for why they continued to believe that Jesus was the promised messiah even after he had been killed by the Romans. But the question is this: What did they actually see? The other question is this: Why did seeing it cause them to believe Jesus had risen from the dead?

One of the common responses apologists give to the hallucination hypothesis is that hallucinations are, by their nature, subjective experiences. You can no more see somebody else's hallucination than you can see somebody else's dream, and the reason is because hallucinations and dreams only happen in the mind. There's no objective reality outside the mind that more than one person could see. And since the appearances of Jesus happened in groups, it could not have been a hallucination.

There are two responses to that argument I have heard. I came up with one of them myself a few years ago. In my theory, Peter was actually the only one who saw Jesus. The others believed his story and soon began to claim that they had seen Jesus as well even though they didn't. But they each believed each other's testimony, and that strengthened the faith of each of them that Jesus really had risen from the dead.

This theory is basically a denial that the appearances happened in groups. Since there's no group appearances, the hallucination hypothesis remains viable. However; it appears from the gospels and 1 Corinthians that the appearances happened in groups. How do we account for that? Well, it isn't hard to imagine how that might've happened given my theory. Suppose one of the apostles is preaching the gospel in a new town, and he tells them that Jesus was raised from the dead. Somebody says, "Did you see him yourself?" The apostle replies, "Oh yeah. We ALL saw him." That would be consistent with my theory because, in fact, all of them claimed to see Jesus. But the listeners mistakenly infer that the apostles saw him at the same time. So when some of the listeners begin to tell others about the gospel, they portray the appearances as if they were group appearances. It's an easy mistake, and it could've happened early on. You might think that if this misunderstanding was widespread during the lifetime of the apostles they would've corrected it, but I don't know if it would've been worth correcting from their point of view. From their point of view, would it really matter whether they all saw Jesus individually or at the same time? I can't think of a motive for the apostles to go to the trouble of straightening out this detail.

I think the appearances probably did happen in groups, though, for a couple of reasons. In Paul's appearance traditions he quotes in 1 Corinthians 15, he says that Jesus appeared to Peter, then to the twelve. He also says Jesus appeared to James, then to all the apostles. These two traditions seem to be reports of the same appearances but from different sources. And I've read this in some of the scholarly literature. They think the first tradition came from Peter or some of his followers, and the other one came from James or some of his followers. That's why you have Peter at the head of one tradition and James at the head of the other even though "the apostles" and "the twelve" refer to the same group of people. So these appearance traditions come right from the source. They aren't the end product of a long telephone game. Pinchas Lapide went so far as to say that they can be taken as eye-witness testimony from the apostles themselves. These two appearance traditions don't necessarily entail group appearances, but they do strongly imply it. That's one reason I think the appearances happened in groups.

The other reason is because Paul mentions these 500 witnesses. I don't think Paul is quoting an oral tradition at this point because he makes a parenthetical comment about them, that most of them were still living, though some had fallen asleep. That couldn't have been an oral tradition because if it was, it would have to be continually updated as more and more of them died. Apologists often take this as Paul challenging the Corinthians to check out the claim. They could ask these witnesses themselves. The weakness, of course, is that Paul doesn't identify any of these witnesses. Still, the parenthetical comment makes me think that a large number of people must've claimed to have seen Jesus. Paul would have to have been intentionally making things up to claim that some of them had died. It's possible Paul may have been exaggerating the number or just guestimating, but his parenthetical comment makes me believe they really existed. I don't think it's likely that such a large number of people would claim they saw Jesus individually. Given such a large number of people, I think it's likely that at least some of them claimed to see Jesus in groups. After all, how could Paul even come up with an estimate if there were just random individuals here and there claiming to have seen Jesus? I think it's far less likely that a group of people would lie about an appearance than that an individual would lie about an appearance.

N.T. Wright makes another good point. If people were individually claiming to see the risen Jesus, it's inexplicable that these appearances seem to have suddenly stopped. From all our sources, it appears that Paul's appearance is odd in the fact that it happened much later than everybody else's, and nobody after Paul ever claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. If people were going about claiming to have seen Jesus just to be cool, we shouldn't expect those claims to all of a sudden stop.

So I think there probably were group appearances. But I don't think that necessarily undermines the hallucination hypothesis, which brings me to my second response to the claim that hallucinations don't happen in groups. The most common counter-example is Marian apparitions, which involve groups of people claiming to see Mary. Now let's face it. People often do claim to see things in groups even though there's nothing really there to see. You see this kind of stuff all the time. If I saw a face in a cloud that nobody else saw, but then I pointed it out to other people, pretty soon, they'd see the face, too. They'd see it because they were looking for it. They expected to see it. That's the only reason anybody ever saw Mother Theresa in a cinnamon roll. Maybe the apostles saw something or somebody who resembled Jesus, and they believed it was him.

One problem with this line of reasoning is that the apostles likely were not expecting to see Jesus. One reason, as Bill Craig often points out, is that Jews who believed in resurrection all seemed to think of resurrection as an eschatological event. It was something that happened on the last day, not in the middle of history. And the resurrection was supposed to be general, not individual. I went into detail about this point in November and December 2005 in my series on the resurrection in parts 1-5, so I won't repeat the arguments here. The other reason the apostles probably weren't expecting the resurrection is because resurrection wasn't an obvious part of what the messiah was supposed to do. The messiah was supposed to sit on the throne of David, reestablish national sovereignty, and usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Instead of running the Romans out, Jesus was crucified by them and subjected to publish humiliation. To any Jew, that would've signified that he was a failure. And, in fact, no messianic movement other than Jesus' survived the death of its leader, and there were quite a few of them in the first and second centuries. Given common Jewish expectations about the messiah, we should expect the apostles to have given up hope after Jesus was arrested and crucified. And, as it turns out, that's exactly what the gospels report.

On the other hand, the gospels also report that Jesus predicted his resurrection. It says the apostles couldn't really wrap their heads around what he was saying, but if Jesus really did predict his resurrection, then maybe they were holding out some remote hope that he might rise from the dead. If so, then maybe they were looking for him. If so, then maybe they saw him just like people see faces in clouds or Mother Theresa in a cinnamon roll.

C.S. Lewis pointed something out in his book on Miracles that seems to count against the idea that the apostles were expecting to see Jesus. He pointed out that on a few occasions where Jesus appeared to the apostles, they did not immediate recognize him. Assuming that really did happen, I agree with him that it counts against the notion that the apostles saw Jesus because they were expecting to see him or because they were looking for him. It would seem odd not to recognize the object of your own mental projection. The only difficulty is trying to establish that particular detail of the narrative. It's one thing to say Jesus appeared to the apostles; it's another thing to say he appeared in a particular way at a particular place and had a particular conversation, etc. I haven't thought about it that much, but it seems to me you'd have to come up with some possible motives for why the authors would include that detail if it didn't happen. Does it serve some apologetic or rhetorical purpose?

The major problem I have with the hallucination hypothesis is that it doesn't really explain why the apostles came to believe Jesus had risen from the dead. Think about this for a minute. Think of somebody you know to have died, like a relative or something. Maybe your parents. What would you honestly think if you saw that person standing right in front of you right now? It seems like you'd have a few options:

1. You're dreaming.
2. You're hallucinating.
3. You're seeing a ghost.
4. The person never died to begin with.
5. The person has risen from the dead.

I put this question to my daughter a while back when I first thought of it. She has a cousin who died three years ago, so I asked Grace what she would think if she saw Madeline standing right in front of her, and I gave her some of these options. I left out the dreaming one because I didn't think of it at the time, but Grace said she'd think she was dreaming. That wasn't what I expected her to say. I expected her to say it was a ghost because that's probably what I would think. Plus, Grace's mother used to be a ghost hunter, and Grace was kind of interested in the subject. I don't think I'd assume I was dreaming. I might entertain the thought at first, but it wouldn't take much to convince me that I was awake. I'd probably rub my eyes a lot and look really carefully. My mind would be reeling, trying to make sense out of it. I've seen weird stuff before, so I know this is probably how I'd react. The very last thing I would think was that she had risen from the dead. The second to last thing I'd think was that she had never died. The first thing I'd probably think once I came to my senses was that I was hallucinating. But after rubbing my eyes for a while, walking around and looking at different angles, and maybe even talking to her, I'd probably come to the conclusion that I was seeing a ghost. I suspect that's what most people would think in a similar situation.

And, it turns out that's exactly what the gospels report that the apostles thought (Luke 24:37). They thought they were seeing a spirit. Luke goes on to say that Jesus corrected their misunderstanding by pointing to the scars on his hands and feet and then eating in front of them. John's gospels reports that Thomas wanted to actually touch Jesus before he'd believe. 1 John begins with "what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands..." Why all this emphasis on the physicality of Jesus? Why the emphasis on touching and eating to prove that Jesus really had risen from the dead? Well, I think it's only natural because nobody would conclude that a dead person was physically alive, walking and talking, just because they saw a vision or hallucination. It would take a lot more than that. Seeing Elvis made people think he never died, not that he had risen from the dead. Seeing Mary was only consistent with what Catholics already believed--that Mary never died, not that she had risen from the dead. If I saw my niece alive who I know to be dead, it would take a lot to convince me she was really alive. I'd have to touch her with my own hands and see that she was tangible, and it would help to see her eat something. And that's probably what I'd say to people if I were telling them about it. I'd say, "Holy cow, I didn't believe it myself until I actually touched her. I mean I felt her with my own hands, and she was as tangible as anything! She sat right here and ate a veggie burger." Madeline was a vegetarian, by the way.

I want to point out a weakness in relying on the appearance traditions that Paul quoted in 1 Corinthians 15. I wanted to stick this somewhere in the body of my blog here, but I couldn't find a place for it that didn't destroy the flow. So I'm just sticking it right here at the end. The Mormons have, at the beginning of The Book of Mormon, a testimony signed by several people saying that they saw the golden plates from which Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. Mormons believe these testimonies provide evidence that the golden plates really existed even though we no longer have them because the angel, Moroni, took them away once Joseph Smith finished the translation. If all we had was this written testimony, it might seem persuasive. After all, these people signed it. They endorsed it. But that isn't all the information we have. It turns out that a few of them wrote about their experiences later on. When you read their individual accounts, it becomes ambiguous whether anybody actually saw the plates at all. The three witnesses didn't see the plates. They went out in the woods and prayed to be able to see them and ended up only seeing a vision of the plates, not the plates themselves. A few of the other witnesses said they only got to feel the plates which were hidden under some cloth or something. They didn't actually see them. If all we had was the appearance traditions quoted by Paul, then even if these appearances came from Peter and James themselves, we'd be justified in questioning what it is they actually saw. Maybe they DID just see a hallucination or something like Mother Theresa in a cinnamon roll. Of course I already explained why I don't buy that.

I haven't said anything about the appearance to Paul. I'm really hungry, though, so I'm not going to talk about the appearance to Paul. I don't have much to say about it anyway. There is the argument that since the appearance to Paul was visionary, and since Paul thinks his appearance was just like the appearance to the other apostles, that Paul must've understood their appearances to be visionary as well. That's an argument worth responding to. Maybe I'll do that some other time.

Why theology matters

2011-06-15T13:39:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, I was visited by a couple of Mormon missionaries. Each of them had only been doing missionary work for four months, and they openly admitted that they didn't know much. I asked them a lot of questions about the nature of God and whether various things I had heard about Mormons were official teachings of the LDS Church or whether they were merely the opinion of various people within the church. At one point, one of them said something to the effect that theology (the study of God) is not important. What's important is just the gospel. It's not important whether God is capable of evil, whether God had a father before him, whether God is the only god, whether God changes/progresses, etc. I explained to them why I think theology DOES matter, and I thought it would make a good blog post.

First, it's because if we are to truly worship God, we must know something about him. Worship includes praise, and praise is an appreciation of somebody's character, attributes, and accomplishments. But if you didn't know anything about somebody, what would you praise them for? Imagine if I told you that you needed to worship Brian. Your first question would be, "Who is Brian?" The only way I can answer that question is to tell you something about Brian. In the same way, if Christians are going to tell people they need to worship Yahweh, then we need to give some content to that word. Without knowing something about God, "Yahweh" is just a word.

Second, it's because having accurate information about God (i.e. correct theology) helps us to distinguish the true god from false gods. If we knew nothing about Yahweh, and somebody who worshipped a different god, like Baal or Osiris, started calling his god "Yahweh," we couldn't know the difference unless we knew something about the real Yahweh. If we didn't know anything about any God, we couldn't know whether Yahweh, Baal, and Osiris were actually the same god or whether they were different gods. The first commandment is that we worship Yahweh and Yahweh alone. We are not to worship any other god. The only way we can keep that commandment is if we have our theology right.

Actually, I didn't give them that second reason. I thought of that later. I just gave them the first reason.

Who's afraid of the big bad critic?

2011-04-27T12:16:00.002-04:00

A couple of months ago, somebody wrote me who was just starting out in philosophy and apologetics. He confessed that he feared challenge and critique, not just because he'd lose face over it, but because he would fail the church because of it. I offered him my advice in reply and was just thinking it might be helpful to others, so I'm going to make a blog post out of it. Here ye go:

I think everybody, whether Christian or not, has experienced a little anxiety in a debate or when reading an opposing book or article. I think the primary reason we have this anxiety is because our ego is at stake. That's especially the case when you're in a face to face encounter. All of us, at one time or another, have discovered that we were wrong about something, and changed our minds as a result. But nobody wants to be proved wrong in the heat of battle because it stings our ego.

And people are sometimes very emotionally attached to their point of view, and it's painful to have to give it up. That's especially the case for Christians, I think, because of the emphasis we put on having a personal relationship with our lord and savior. Finding out he's not really our lord and savior is kind of like losing your best friend. If you had your whole purpose for living wrapped up in it, it's very scary to give it up.

There are a few things that have helped me with my anxiety when facing opposition:

1. Place a high value on truth. Maybe you ARE wrong about some things. We shouldn't fear finding out that we're wrong. We should welcome it. If we place a high value on truth, then we'll be thankful for whoever sets us straight. We should make a conscious decision to pursue truth regardless of whether we like it or not. As long as our goal is to discover the truth about things, we should never feel any anxiety about finding out we've been wrong.

2. Swallow your pride. You've heard the saying, "Pride goes before the fall." It's true. If you can't be humble, you can't learn. And if you can't learn, you're doomed to wallow in ignorance. Life will kick your butt if you're too prideful to be corrected or advised by other people. Solomon said, "Do not reprove a scoffer, or he will hate you; Reprove a wise man, and he will love you" (Proverbs 9:8). Be the wise man. Instead of digging in your heals when faced with a tough challenge, acknowledge the merits of the challenge. Admit you don't know something when you don't know it. Don't just make stuff up in an effort to save face.

3. Educate yourself. The more you know, the less anxiety you'll have about being wrong. Do the hard work of studying and refining your apologetic.

4. Read your opposition carefully. There's a tendency to gloss over what our opposition says because we're afraid. This is why there's so much misunderstanding between people with differing points of view. I have found that if I try hard to really understand what my opposition is saying, and to master it to the point that I could defend their position myself, the flaws in their arguments will become much more apparent than if I had just glossed over them. Sometimes an argument can seem persuasive at first glance, but when you dig a little deeper you find the flaws. Actually studying the deep atheist thinkers has increased my faith. It's like a kid who is afraid of the monster under his bed. Once he actually looks under his bed to discover there's no monster, his fear goes away.

5. Keep in mind the core essentials of Christianity. At a bare minimum, if God exists, if he imposes moral obligations on us, if we disobey them, and if he judges us, and if Jesus is the Christ, and if he died for sins, and if he was raised from the dead, then Christianity is true. Keep that in mind because the majority of our critics will attack things that have no bearing on the truth of any of these essentials. For example, you'll hear a lot about Bible contradictions, and you can get bogged down in endless discussions of contradictions and reconciliations, but none of that tells you anything about whether those core elements of Christianity are true. So when you're faced with a challenge you can't answer, just ask yourself, "If the other person is right, what bearing does that have on these core tenants of Christianity? Could Christianity be true if my opponent's arguments are sound?" I have found this to be very useful in my debates. I avoid rabbit trails or insignificant arguments. I don't even debate inerrancy with non-believers. Stay focused when you're debating on line, and keep in mind the importance of the topic you're debating and it's bearing on whether or not Christianity is true.

I hope this helps. I also recommend reading "The Ambassador's Creed."

Open Theism

2011-04-26T16:33:00.004-04:00

Open Theism is a subject I haven't thought much about. One of my facebook friends asked for suggestions to blog about. I threw out a suggestion that he didn't want to write about because he hadn't thought much about it. For me, though, blogs are sometimes an opportunity to think out loud, so I decided to blog about something I hadn't thought much about just to show that it can be done. I'm thinking about open theism right now, and I'm going to share my thoughts with you.

First, lemme tell you what I take open theism to be, and mind ye this is just hearsay. Open theism is the view that God does not know everything that is going to happen in the future. More specifically, he doesn't know what free creatures are going to decide in every case.

The first criticism that ordinary theists (closed theists?) might make is that God is all-knowing. That's standard Christian doctrine. And an ordinary theist might accuse an open theism of denying God's omniscience.

The response of an open theist, from what I understand, is that God is all-knowing. To be all-knowing means to know all true propositions. But God can't be faulted for not knowing something when there's nothing to know. God doesn't know what colour my girlfriend's hair is for the simple reason that I don't have a girlfriend. But that doesn't mean he isn't all knowing. There's no answer to the question, "What colour is my girlfriend's hair"? There's no true proposition for God to know. In the same way, say the open theists, there's no true answer to the question, "What is Bob gonna do with that apple?" if Bob has free will and is just as likely to eat it as he is to throw it away.

It's an interesting thing to think about. Open theism depends on the notion of libertarian free will. In compatibilist free will, our choices are determined by our natures, including our desires, biases, motives, beliefs, etc. But in libertarian free will, our choices are not determined by any antecedent causes or conditions, including our mental predispositions. Since nothing determines what a person will do under libertarianism, anything is possible (within physical limits, of course). Somehow, Open theists seem to think this removes all truth value from future tensed propositions when it comes to describing the future actions of free creatures.

One way they might get there is to say that if there is some definite truth about what you are going to choose in the future, then you can't choose otherwise since, if you did, then the original "truth" would not have really been true after all. So if there is some definite truth about your future choices, then you cannot have libertarian free will. But since you do have libertarian free will, then there's no definite truth about what you're going to choose in the future. That's a logically valid argument, but I dispute both premises. I don't believe we have libertarian free will. I'm a compatibilist. But I don't think there being definite truths about our future choices amounts to our choices being determined, so I don't think future tensed truths are inconsistent with us having libertarian free will. I won't go into that because I wrote about it here.

Also, I gave some philosophical arguments for compatibilism in various other blogs, which I linked to here. I argued in there that compatibilism makes better sense out of morality than libertarianism does. So if we have moral obligations, then compatibilism is more likely to be true than libertarianism.

But lots of Biblical arguments have been made for compatibilism, too. One of the best I've read was Martin Luther's book on The Bondage of the Will.

But even without appealing to compatibilism over and against libertarianism, a person could argue against open theism by pointing to the many prophecies in the Bible that seem to depend on human decision for their fulfillment. Clearly, God knew what people were going to do. Otherwise, he would not have been able to make those certain predictions. The Bible clearly portrays God as knowing the future actions of his creatures.

I suppose an open theist could respond by saying that since God doesn't exhaustively predict all future acts of all his creatures, these Biblical prophecies do not negate open theism. They could argue that in the case of prophecy, God overrides libertarian free will, but he only does so in isolated circumstances in order to bring his prophecies to fulfillment. It isn't his usual course of action. I don't really have an answer for that. I'd have to look up passages to see exactly what it says about God's future knowledge.

Open Theism also seems to depend on a dynamic theory of time. If time is static, and God exists outside of time and is able to observe the entire spectrum of time as if it were all "now" from his point of view, then it seems obvious that he would know everything that every free creature would ever choose. Only if God is in time, like the rest of us, would any problem arise, it seems to me, because then God would either have to predict the future or wait to see what happens. So if it turns out that the static view of time is correct, that would probably be a good argument against open theism. I happen to subscribe to the dynamic theory of time, though, so I wouldn't go that route.

Messages from God on Facebook: Hearing the voice of God

2011-04-11T16:42:00.002-04:00

Remember when I mentioned that facebook has this "message from God" app that will post a message as if it were God speaking to you? Well, today, one of my friends got a "message from God" that went like this:

On this day, God wants you to know that silence is golden. When we are quiet, we can hear God's messages to us. Sometimes these messages may be in the form of subtle intuition. Sometimes it may feel like an inner knowing. Sometimes we may hear a 'still, small voice.' If it feels right in your heart, trust that it is God speaking to you.

This is a good example of why I don't like these. This is just silly, but unfortunately, a big chunk of the Christian population out there thinks this way. Very few actually try to live their lives this way. The few I've met have not had much success with it.

For the antidote, see Decision Making and the Will of God by Garry Friesen or Decision Making and the Will of God by Gregory Koukl.

A Calvinism thought experiment

2011-01-12T14:49:00.004-05:00

Since becoming a Calvinist, I've given a lot of thought to the issue of how people can be morally accountable for their actions if God decrees everything that comes to pass, including human decisions. Calvinists usually subscribe to compatibilist free will to reconcile the situation, but people have a difficult time understanding how people can be morally accountable for their actions if their actions are determined by motives and desires that they did not choose. I wrote two series of blogs about this problem. The first is a nine part series called "Argument against morality from determinism" where I argued that compatibilism is compatible with moral responsibility. You can read them here: intro: the power of intuition, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, and part 9. The second is a five part series called "God's Sovereignty and Human Responsibility," where I argued, building on the previous series, that God's sovereignty is compatible with human responsibility. You can read them here: intro: My conversion to Calvinism, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. The discussion in the comments section of parts 3 and 4 are worth reading, too.

After all this, I tried to come up with thought experiments that would appeal to most people's intuition and that would help them see that people can be morally accountable for their actions even if God made them the way they are. I came up with one regarding Voldemort, which I posted on my blog here. I wanted to find out if this thought experiment would have an intuitive appeal in favour of the Calvinist view or not, so I posted it on Yahoo Answers to see what people would say. This is the question I asked:

As all us Harry Potter fans know, Voldemort is not a real person. As a fictional character, he's evil and blameworthy within the story, but not in real life. But suppose J.K. Rowling had the power to bring Voldemort to real life. And suppose that if she did so, the real Voldemort would be exactly like he is in the books. He'd be just as mean and nasty and evil. Would he be morally blameable for his actions?

I intentionally left out any reference to Calvinism because I wanted to get opinions from people without their bias for or against Calvinism playing a part in their answer. Sometimes people resist the force of an argument if they don't like where it is going. The majority of people who answered thought that Voldemort would be morally responsible for his actions in spite of the fact that he didn't choose to come into existence or to have all those nasty dispositions, which is what I was hoping for.

It wasn't until just the other day that I actually used this thought experiment in a real conversation about Calvinism in order to persuade the other person. The conversation took place on Stand to Reason's facebook discussion forum, and you can read the conversation here. As I suspected, the person I was talking to was not persuaded by the thought experiment.

So I came up with a different thought experiment, and that is the whole reason for this blog post--to share the next thought experiment I came up with and to see what you think about it. Here it is:

Let's suppose there are two people named Voldemort, and that they are exactly alike in every way. They look alike, dress alike, smell alike, talk alike, etc. They have identical DNA, an identical brain structure, identical mental structure (including desires, biases, beliefs, memories, personality, etc.). The only difference between them is that one of them was born and came into the world the usual way. The other was brought into existence by J.K. Rowling just a few days ago. Would you say...

A. They are both morally accountable for their actions;
B. Only the one born the usual way is accountable for his actions;
or
C. Neither one of them is accountable for his actions?

And since I'm making so many links in this blog entry, I might as well link to another conversation I had on this same topic. The subject came up on STR's blog, and you can read it here. And there's another related conversation here on whether Jesus could sin, and if not, was he really tempted?

There. Now I've got all these handy links in one place so if I ever want to read any of this again, I won't have to look it up. How convenient!

What is worship?

2011-01-09T21:08:00.001-05:00

I just copied this from a comment I made on another blog...

I remember going to church when I was a lot younger and singing a bunch of songs that included things like, “I will worship you,” and things like that. It made me wonder what worship really was. I mean if singing those songs WAS worshipping God, then the lyrics should’ve said, “I am worshipping you.” So I remember in the back of my mind wondering when we were going to worship God, and what that would even mean.

Just the other day, I started thinking about the ways we worship, which usually include singing, praising, and praying. But we do all those things to ordinary people. We write songs about people, we congratulate people, and I communicate with people, sometimes even making requests (which is what “pray” literally means–to ask). So is worship just a more extreme version of all singing, praising, and praying to somebody? I mean obviously praise comes in degrees. We praise our children for getting good grades, or we praise our favourite apologist for giving a good talk. But the praise we offer God is a whole lot more lofty than the praise we give our fellow man. Is that really the difference? Is the distinction between worship and ordinary praise really just a matter of degree?

Some people say that anything we do for the glory of God is worship. Acts of kindness and charity can be considered a form of worship. Studying the Bible, or even studying philosophy can be considered a form of worship. I’m not sure how I feel about that because I can’t think of an Biblical examples of anything like that being referred to as worship.

There are several places in the Bible that say somebody “fell down and worshipped him.” When I was really little, I used to think worship was just bowing low with your hands in front of you, rising up, and bowing down again. But it can’t just be that. That’s just a physical motion. People even do it jokingly to each other (is that wrong?). Falling down can’t be equivalent to worship because (1) it’s possible to fall down and NOT worship, and (2) if they meant the same thing, the Bible would just say, “they fell down,” or “they worshipped.” It would be redundant to say “they fell down and worshipped.” But I suppose it could be that falling down was included in the worship. If so, what else was included? Since falling down, by itself, isn’t worship, but becomes worship when coupled with some other activity, what other activity is involved? Is it just a mental thing? Kind of like when everybody stands up when somebody enters the room? After all, standing up, by itself, is not an act of reverence, respect, or homage, but standing up as an intentional way of recognizing somebody’s authority, or respecting them IS an act of reverence, respect, or homage. It’s the intention that makes it so. Is it the same with “falling down and worshipping”? Is it worshipping just because of the intentional reason for falling down before God?

Thoughts anybody?

Michael Martin and Paul Copan on morality

2011-01-07T18:16:00.000-05:00

A long time ago, there was an exchange between Paul Copan and Michael Martin on morality, the moral argument for God, the divine command theory, Euthyphro's dilemma, etc. I remember it being really interesting and educational, so I thought I'd provide links to the article in the order in which they were written, not just for you, but for me, too, so I don't have to use google if I want to find them all again. :-)

"Atheism, Christian Theism, and Rape" by Michael Martin

"Can Micahel Martin Be a Moral Realist?" by Paul Copan

"Copan's Critique of Atheistic Objective Morality" by Michael Martin

"Atheistic Goodness Revisited: A Personal Reply to Michael Martin" by Paul Copan

"The Naturalistic Fallacy and Other Mistaken Arguments of Paul Copan" by Michael Martin

As far as I know, Paul Copan never responded to Michael Martin's last article, but I did find this short interaction with Martin's last article:

Atheist Michael Martin admits to this admixture [that man is both a sinner and a saint]; within the space of two paragraphs that humans both “seem so ungod-like” and are superior to animals in “intelligence, advanced linguistic and artistic capabilities,” possessing “mathematical, scientific, and technological knowledge.”8

Fn 8: Michael Martin, “A Response to Paul Copan’s Critique of Atheistic Objective Morality,” Philosophia Christi, 2 (2000): 75-90. I reply to Martin’s mistake in “Atheistic Goodness Revisited: A Personal Reply to Michael Martin” Philosophia Christi, Series 2, Vol. 2 (2000): 91-104. For some strange reason, in a later on-line essay, Martin persists in accusing me of a “contradiction” he himself espouses (humans as a mixed bag of goodness and evil) and that I had already addressed in my response to him (“The Naturalistic Fallacy and Other Mistaken Arguments of Paul Copan” [2000]: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/copan.html). Martin’s obvious error is failing to distinguish between essential and accidental properties. Thomas V. Morris puts it this way: “There are properties which happen to be common to members of a natural kind, and which may even be universal to all members of that kind, without being essential to membership in the kind” (Our Idea of God [Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1991], 164). On the differences between essential and accidental, see Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).

That's all I could find. Paul Copan has written a few things since then on this same subject, though. There's a list of his articles here, some of which are on the subject of grounding morality.

God signs

2011-01-06T15:57:00.003-05:00

From time to time you see God signs like this quoting God. When people read them, nobody thinks God actually said these things. Even though they are usually written by Christians, nobody accuses the Christians of false prophecy either. The reason is because that would be a confusion of genre. The signs are not meant to be prophecy, so they can't be false prophecy.

On facebook, some people have this app where "God wants you to know..." something. The app posts a blurb written in first person from God's point of view that usually contains some shallow platitude or feel-good advice. But nobody thinks God himself is actually saying these things, and nobody intends for it to be taken as if he did.

I also see mock conversations between God and somebody else that Christians include on T-shirts, cards, books, or whatever that are supposed to illustrate some point. But none of these things are meant to convey what the author thinks God actually said. Nobody takes them that way, and nobody intends for them to be taken that way.

Do you ever wonder if some of the things in the Bible are that way? Maybe it's a genre, and maybe some of the "prophecies" in the Bible fall under that genre and are not meant to be taken as prophecy at all. I'm inclined to think apocalyptic literature (e.g. Daniel and Revelation) are like that. What do you think?

Natural and Unnatural

2010-11-30T16:30:00.002-05:00

I posted a question on Yahoo answers recently asking how vegans felt about breast feeding. You see, vegans differ from vegetarians in that while neither will eat meat, vegetarians are at least willing to eat animal products such as eggs, milk, and cheese. Vegans won't even eat animal products. So I was curious to know how they felt about breast feeding since that involves consuming an animal product.

The best answer I got was essentially this:

1. Vegans are against exploitation.
2. Breast feeding is not exploitation, but eating non-human animal products is.
3. Therefore vegans are okay with breast feeding, but they are against eating non-human animal products.

That seemed consistent to me.

But there was another argument brought up that I wasn't so sure about. A few people pointed out that breast feeding is natural, but eating the products of other animals is not. It was as if to say that as long as something is natural, it is okay, and if it is unnatural, then it is not okay.

I almost posted another question about that. I was curious to know how vegans felt about homosexuality. Arguably, it's unnatural since male parts and female parts are complimentary, but same sex parts aren't. To be consistent, shouldn't vegans also oppose homosexuality for the same reason? But most vegans I've met tend to be liberal, and most liberals tend to be okay with homosexuality.

Of course a lot of people will say that homosexuality is natural just because other animals also engage in homosexual behavior. But if a vegan makes that argument, they will undermine their argument for being vegan. After all, coyotes eat chicken eggs. In fact, LOTS of other animals eat eggs that don't belong to them. Does that make eating eggs natural and therefore okay? And I've also seen interspecies breast feeding, although that usually happens in captivity more than in the wild, so I guess they could say it's still unnatural.

I'm not convinced that natural = okay or that unnatural = bad. I can think of counter-examples of both. But what do you think? Do you think if something is natural that it's okay, and if it's unnatural it's not okay? And how do you distinguish between what is natural and what isn't? Are non-human animals even capable of doing something that isn't natural? If not, then how are we? If we are capable of doing what is natural and also what is unnatural, how do you tell the difference? What makes something natural or unnatural?

If you're a Calvinist, wouldn't you have to admit that the natural state of man is that he is a sinner? Isn't sin natural? If sin is natural, then how can you equate the natural with the morally permissible and the unnatural with being morally wrong?

Bill Craig, Richard Dawkins, and MMA

2010-11-12T10:16:00.006-05:00

I just found out that William Lane Craig and Richard Dawkins are scheduled to participate in a panel discussion this Saturday morning, November 13, in a Mexican conference called Ciudad de las Ideas. There will be six people on the panel discussing the question, "Does the Universe Have a Purpose?"

[UPDATE: Here is the video on youtube. Hopefully they will eventually release a version without the Spanish translator.]

[2nd UPDATE: Here is the English version of the debate.]

As most of you know, Dawkins has refused for some time to debate Craig. As he explained on this video clip, he'll debate a bishop, a cardinal, a pope, or an archbishop, but he doesn't debate creationists, and he won't debate somebody whose only claim to fame is that they are a good debater; he's too busy. Dawkins' naivety regarding Craig can be excused back then, but by now he must know that Craig is widely published in academic journals and is well-respected among his peers, so he can no longer use the excuse that Craig's only claim to fame is that he is a good debater. And a professional philosopher, of course, is more qualified to debate the question of God's existence than an ordinary bishop or cardinal. In fact, Craig is more qualified than Dawkins since Craig is trained in philosophy and Dawkins isn't. And Dawkins did debate John Lennox (see debate), which raises questions about Dawkins' willingness to debate creationists.

A lot of Christians out there have raised complaints about Dawkins' refusal to debate Craig. I've seen most of these in the comment sections of videos on youtube. Those on Dawkins' side always ask something like, "Well, why is it such a big deal to you Christians that he debate Craig? Why do you want to see this debate so bad? Why should Dawkins debate Craig?"

I think the reason people are drawn to debates is pretty much the same as why they are drawn to MMA. The appeal is the same in both cases. There are two kinds of confrontations we like to see. The first is a clash of titans. When we know of two amazing fighters who never seem to lose, we want to see what would happen if they were matched against each other. What would happen if an immovable object were confronted with an unstoppable force? It's the same in debates. We want to see the smartest people on both sides go at it to see who will win. We like to see giants fall, especially when they are on the other team.

The second kind of confrontation is a confrontation between smack-talkers or arrogant people. We like to see the arrogant humbled. We like to see smack talkers eat their own words. Atheists and Christians talk smack almost as much as MMA fighters; they just do it a little differently. I mean think about it. If you're Catholic, wouldn't you love to see James White defeated soundly in a debate?

The reason we Christians want to see Dawkins and Craig debate is because we already know Craig is going to win. Dawkins has gotten away with belittling Christianity in public unchecked, and he comes across as amazingly arrogant in his talks and books. The God Delusion is one of the most popular books out there defending atheism, and most of the people who read it will probably never read anything by William Lane Craig (I question whether Dawkins has either). Given the influence of Dawkins' book, it should be perfectly understandable why we Christians would want to see Dawkins defeated in a public debate. We want all the people who think so highly of Dawkins to see that his arguments will not stand up to scrutiny against a trained Christian thinker like Craig. We want to see him humbled and exposed. The hope is that it will at least open his followers up to reading good academic material from the other side. We want to shake their unfounded confidence in their atheism that appears to us to be the result of skilled smack talk rather than good arguments. (It's interesting how persuasive somebody can be when, instead of really having good arguments, they just sound very confident.)

Craig has two major advantages over Dawkins. First, he's more educated in natural theology than Dawkins is, and his arguments are better. Second, Craig has more skill and experience at public debate than Dawkins. So it would be a total shock to me if Craig did not clearly win a debate with Dawkins on the existence of God, and I suspect that has a lot to do with why Dawkins won't debate him, in spite of what he says.

I think Dawkins' claim that he's too busy to debate creationists or that it's beneath him is a poor excuse not to debate Craig given how much time Dawkins has spent writing against these people. If you're going to publish books to refute intelligent design or theistic philosophy, then you can't turn around and claim it's a waste of time to refute them in debate. I'm not saying everybody who writes a book is obliged to debate. Most people don't debate at all, and that's fine. But if you are open to debating, like Dawkins is, then you can't use the excuse that you haven't got time when clearly you have. If Dawkins thinks that refuting creationists is the waste of time, then he should never have written chapter 4 on The God Delusion. I haven't read The Greatest Show On Earth yet, but I'll bet he "wasted time" refuting intelligent design in there, too.

I think public debates do have some value. When two people write books defending opposite views, we want to know how they would deal with each other directly. You can't cover a whole lot of material in a debate, but I think it's helpful to see a little peer review. It's helpful to see if a person's point of view can stand up to scrutiny, and how they will respond directly to their critics. The usefulness of debates, of course, is diminished by the fact that sometimes the outcome of the debate has more to do with the skill of the debaters than with the defensibility of their positions. (I would probably be a horrible debater because I'd get nervous, and I can't think when I'm nervous. I even get nervous when I call radio shows to talk to people who are on my side. I'd be a mess if I had to debate somebody in public who was not on my side.) But for the most part, I think debates are interesting merely for their entertainment value. We just like to see titans clash and the arrogant humbled. Debates are entertainment pretty much for the same reason MMA is entertaining.

Re: A Pro-Choice Perspective

2010-09-29T22:09:00.003-04:00

This is a response to a blog entry by Julie Wallace posted on The Mommypotamus blog. To get the full effect, you should read her blog first. I wrote this addressing her because originally I was going to post it as a comment under her blog, but it got too long, so I'm just going to post it here and provide a link there.

Hi Julie. A friend of mine on Facebook linked to your blog, and one of her friends suggested that we pro-life people read it with an open mind, so I did the best I could. I had a few disagreements with it that I wanted to mention, but before I do, I wanted to mention a couple of points of agreement.

First, I totally agree that the differences between the pro-choice and the pro-life camps should not prevent us from working together to reduce the number of abortions. Both sides seem to agree that adoption is a good alternative and ought to be encouraged. Second, I also agree that encouraging interracial adoption would be a good idea.

I could be persuaded if I had more facts, but I'm a bit skeptical that encouraging interracial adoption will do anything to reduce the number of abortions. From what I understand (and I could be wrong), the black children who have trouble finding homes are not newborns. There are more people willing to adopt newborns than there are newborns, and I've never heard of anybody, black or white, who had a difficult time finding somebody to adopt their newborn. But I'm open to correction on that.

Regarding the first misconception, I've never thought that "pro choice" meant "pro abortion," but I can understand how this confusion might come about. Maybe if pro-choice people tried a little harder to understand the pro-life position, they would also understand where these misconceptions comes from. And once they understand where the misconceptions come from, they can do a better job of straightening them out.

I'll give you an example of where this misconception comes from. Typically, people think of Planned Parenthood as a pro-choice organization, and they think of Crises Pregnancy Centers as being pro-life. It's understandable that, being pro-life, Crises Pregnancy Centers would try to help pregnant women with options, such as adoption, that would discourage them from resorting to abortion. But if Planned Parenthood were really pro-choice, we should expect them to help women who choose life just as much as they help women who choose abortion. But that isn't the case at all. Planned Parenthood does far more for women who choose abortion than for women who choose life. It is hard for some people to believe that Planned Parenthood is really pro-choice when they seem to only support one option--abortion.

You say that it is a misconception to equate "reproductive rights" with "abortion rights," but you don't do anything to explain where the misconception lies. What is the difference? You appear to contradict yourself later in your blog when you say, "The pro-choice movement is not about trying to convince women to have abortions; it is about empowering women to be able to make their own reproductive choices, free from state interference, regardless of their belief system." If the pro-choice movement is about reproductive choices, doesn't that include "abortion rights"?

I think it is disingenuous for you to say that abortion being about the life of the unborn is a misconception on the part of pro-life advocates since it is the linchpin of their argument for the pro-life position. This is the argument:

1. It is wrong to take the life of an innocent human being without proper justification.
2. Abortion takes the life of an innocent human being without proper justification.
3. Therefore, it's wrong to have an abortion.

Everybody agrees that it's wrong to take the life of innocent people without justification. And everybody agrees that abortion takes the life of something. There are only two relevant questions remaining: 1) What is the unborn? and 2) What is the justification for taking the life of the unborn?

From a pro-life perspective, if the unborn is anything other than an innocent human being, then no justification for abortion is necessary. If it's just a lump of tissue, an organ, or an appendage of the mother's body, then we don't need to offer reasons for why it ought to be legal. Just have the abortion; it's no different than having your appendix removed. But if the unborn is a distinct individual human being, then the only justification for taking its life that is adequate is to save the life of the mother. The reasons pro-choice people typically offer to justify abortions would never be used to justify killing somebody outside the womb. For example, you'd never condone infanticide just because it would spare the child grief later on in life. You'd never condone infanticide just because it relieves the mother of trauma, grief, or a financial burden. And for goodness sake, you'd never condone infanticide just to make it safer for mothers to kill their children! If the reasons pro-choice people offer would not work to justify killing a child, and if the unborn are just as much human beings as children are, then those reasons do not work to justify abortion either.

Now, granted, there are pro-choice people who think the unborn are just as much human beings as the born are, but who still think abortion ought to be legal. I can fully understand why such people would think it's a misconception that the debate is about the life of the unborn. Obviously, it's not about the life of the unborn for them, since they think abortion is justified anyway. But I think you are badly mistaken to think the life of the unborn is not a relevant factor in the debate.

I am skeptical that the debate is really about choice, per se. Nobody, on either side of the debate, supports any choice in any situation. We all support choice in areas where the options are all morally neutral or good. We all think people ought to have the freedom to choose their own doctor, whether to get married or not, what do to do for a living, etc. But none of us support the choice to drown our own children in the bathtub, to rob banks, to vandalize cars, etc. Before any of us are going to be pro-choice about anything at all, we first need to answer the question of whether the options under consideration are acceptable or not for a civilized society.

You are mistaken to say that nobody disputes what abortion actually is. I've debated the issue enough and seen enough debates on the issue to know with a high degree of confidence that most pro-choice people do not believe that an individual human life begins at conception. Many of them attribute personhood to the fetus at some later point during the pregnancy, and quite a few of them don't attribute personhood to the unborn until it is born. And, as you seem to recognize, some people use viability as the cut-off point. So you are very mistaken to say that there is no dispute about what abortion does--whether it takes the life of an innocent human being or not. Pro-choice people typically refer to the unborn as a "mass of cells" or a "lump of tissue" prior to when they consider it an individual human life. I've seen this first hand.

Your radical idea that we all stop talking about the moral issue struck me as extremely odd when just a few sentences earlier you said, "The debate is about whether or not the act of abortion is morally okay." And your rationale for why we should end the debate was almost just as odd--that we are never going to solve the dilemma satisfactorily. What, in your mind, would constitute "solving the dilemma"? Does that entail getting everybody to agree with each other? If so, then all debate is futile. Do you expect to convince everybody who reads your blog to be persuaded by your radical idea? If not, then why write it? You yourself are making an argument in this blog that will not convince everybody. If our inability to convince everybody is any reason for why we should end a debate, then you should never have written this blog entry.

But, you see, you don't need to convince everybody before it's fruitful to engage in debate. The fact is, people on both sides have been persuaded by arguments. It is because of arguments that you and I both hold the positions we hold. If you had not been given any reasons to change your mind, you probably would never have become pro-choice. Debate is fruitful whether it causes everybody to agree or not. It clarifies things for us. It forces us to think carefully about our own positions. It gives us an opportunity to understand why people disagree with us. It gives us the opportunity to change our minds. Heaven help us if we ever stop debating!

One of your reasons for why we should not ban abortions is because banning abortion will not reduce the demand for it. I think this is a bad argument for two reasons. First, because it is factually untrue. Abortions became far more prevalent after Roe v. Wade than before. And simple psychology should tell you that any sort of discouragement for an activity will reduce the incidence of that activity. Making abortion illegal certainly will not stop all abortions, but I'm confident that it will reduce them. Think of all the women who struggle with their decision, or vacillate, who sit on the fence trying to make a decision. In their cases, it wouldn't take much to push them one way or the other. If abortion were illegal, those people would be far more likely to choose life because they would have so much extra incentive to do so.

Second, even if banning abortion wouldn't reduce the demand for it, is that any reason to keep it legal? Assume, for the sake of argument, that abortion is no different than infanticide, as the pro-life camp thinks. Should we keep it legal just because people are going to do it anyway? Would you honestly use that same reasoning for any other issue? Laws do not prevent crimes. We all know that. Should we therefore make what we ordinarily consider to be crimes legal just because the law hasn't stopped them? Should bank robbery become legal just because the laws haven't stopped them? Should rape become legal? Hopefully you will agree with me that the notion is absurd.

You said, "In fact, many of my pro-choice friends believe abortion is immoral and have stated they would never do it themselves." This is an area worth pursuing because, as a pro-lifer, this is one area of the pro-choice movement that I confess to not understanding. Maybe you could clear this up for me, but first let me explain where my lack of understanding lies.

Why would anybody think abortion is wrong? Well, as I've said before, whether it's wrong or not depends on whether the unborn is a human being and whether there's adequate justification for it or not. If it's not a human being, then I see no reason why anybody would think it's wrong. So I can only assume that these pro-choice friends of yours fully acknowledge that the unborn are human beings just like everybody else. Now if they think it's wrong to take the life of innocent human beings, they must also think there is no adequate justification for it (because if there were adequate justification for it, then it wouldn't be wrong). But if there's no adequate justification for it, then why be pro-choice? To be pro-choice, don't you have to offer some sort of justification for why you ought to have the legal right to have an abortion in spite of the fact that your unborn is a human being? And if you have such a justification, then why think abortion is wrong? Abortion is either justified or it's not justified, so people who think abortion is wrong but that women should have the right to do it anyway strike me as being wildly inconsistent. It reminds me of what Abraham Lincoln said in the Lincoln/Douglas debates when Douglas argued that even if slavery is wrong, people should still have the right to do it. Lincoln said, "You can't have a right to do a wrong."

Being an attorney, you are no doubt aware of the difference between a causal slippery slope and a logical slippery slope. One is a fallacy, and the other is not. Your slippery slope argument is the former because it is a causal slippery slope. If abortion is a serious moral wrong, we cannot go ahead and allow it just because of what we imagine might happen next. But do we even have good reason to think your grim scenario would result if abortion became illegal? I think your imagined scenario is far-fetched, which is evident in the fact that abortion once WAS illegal in most states, but it did not result in the scenario you imagined. Your scenario is nothing but a non-sense scare tactic designed to persuade your readers to be pro-choice.

You ended your piece with the following questions: "Are you willing to give up your rights just so women can’t procure legal abortions? Or is there another way for you to protect the unborn, one that leaves both your rights and your conscience unharmed?"

My answer is that I don't think it has to be either/or. We can do both. If pro-choice people want to reduce abortions because they think abortions are bad or because they have some desire to preserve life, then why stop at just one method of reducing abortions? Adoption reduces abortions, but does not prevent them altogether. Giving up the right to abortions is exactly the same. So let's do them both!

Does the doctrine of sola scriptura cause divisions?

2010-09-28T12:38:00.002-04:00

I listened to a debate between TurretinFan (an anonymous fellow who is affiliated somehow with Alpha and Omega Ministries) and William Albrecht, which you can listen to on TurretinFan's YouTube channel. The debate turned out to be more interesting than I expected it to be. I just wanted to add my own thoughts to the debate.

Albrecht's primary strategy was to show that there was a correlation between doctrinal and denominational differences and belief in sola scriptura. He explained the correlation by saying sola scriptura had caused the differences.

TurretinFan responded by saying that correlation is not causation.

I agree with TurretinFan, but that got me to thinking. If correlation alone is not enough to demonstrate causation, then how could one demonstrate causation? Well, one way might be to consider the alternative. In any case, we should expect that if we remove the cause, we should also remove the effect.

It isn't quite that easy, though, because there are several different alternatives to subscribing to sola scriptura. One alternative is to deny the authority of the Bible altogether. But clearly removing sola scriptura in that case would not result in greater unity. On the contrary, it results in greater diversity. There are a myriad of religions and non-religious worldviews that deny sola scriptura.

Another alternative is Roman Catholicism, which is the point of view Albrecht holds to. In the case of Roman Catholicism, rather than rejecting the authority of the Bible, they have an additional source of authority alongside the Bible--the teaching magisterium. But this alternative doesn't eliminate diversity in beliefs. Catholics differ with each other on all kinds of things. I heard a sermon by a Catholic priest a long time ago where he quoted a statistic saying that 75% of Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation, even though it is an essential doctrine of Catholicism.

Albrecht seemed to consider any difference in belief on a doctrinal issue as division, whether people separated because of it or not. By that standard, there is lots and lots of division within the Catholic Church. Since the effect (division) remains even in the absence of the supposed cause (sola scriptura), it follows that sola scriptura is not shown to be the cause of division.

That is not to say that sola scriptura doesn't cause any division. One could argue that sola scripture is one among other causes of division, though I think that would be more difficult to demonstrate. I don't think Albrecht successfully demonstrated that sola scriptura causes any division.

But I'm surprised TurretinFan wouldn't admit that it does. On theoretical grounds alone, we should expect it to. Instead, TurretinFan pointed to James 4:1ff as evidence that sin is the cause of division. He says, "Scripture actually tells us one of the reasons, the reason why we have disunity and division among the body of Christ. James 4:1 states..." and then he quotes it.

It's interesting that he corrects himself from saying, "one of the reasons" to saying "the reason." Why did he do that? Well, if sin is the reason, as if there's only one reason, then that would exclude sola scriptura as being a reason, and especially the reason. But if he said, "one of the reasons," then that does not exclude sola scriptura as being one of the reasons. The resolve of the debate is simply that sola scriptura causes division and disunity. If sola scriptura is one among various other causes of disunity and division, then the affirmative (Albrecht) would be in the right. But if sin is merely one of various reasons for disunity and division, then James 4:1 does not negate the resolve. It's irrelevant. So TurretinFan had to correct himself to make it relevant.

It might've been fruitful for them to have debated this passage a little, but they didn't.

I've always thought that arguments against the legitimacy of other views based on diversity of belief were weak arguments. It really all depends on where you draw the circle around "us" and "them." If you're a reformed Baptist, you could say "we" have unity, and since there's so much diversity of belief among everybody else, then "we" must be in the right. Anybody can do that. Jehovah's Witnesses can do that. Five buddhists who all agree with each other on everything could do that. Authority structures like Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Catholics have do create some unity, but the unity is the result of the structure, not the result of actually having the truth on some issue. Somebody could invent a religion, create an authoritative structure around it, and create unity as a result, but that wouldn't give them any claim to legitimacy just because there was unity within their religion and diversity without.

As I've said a number of times on this blog, some amount of uncertainty and division is inevitable, regardless of how you try to patch it up. You just have to live with it. Setting up an authority structure does not solve the problem.

First, you have to figure out which authority structure to listen to--the governing body of Jehovah's Witnesses, the prophets of the LDS Church, or the teaching magisterium of the Catholic Church, etc. Since it would be circular reasoning to take the authority of any of these organizations on their own authority, you're forced to use your own cognitive faculties to assess the evidence and arguments to come to a conclusion. And since we are fallible, we are subject to making mistakes in the process.

Second, you have to interpret the interpreter. And we've seen that all three of the organizations I've mentioned have reinterpreted their own past documents. Non-Catholics are not really damned to hell. Black people aren't really cursed by God. The anointed class of Jehovah's Witnesses are not really inspired prophets. Etc. etc. Having an authoritative interpreter of the Bible doesn't really solve the problem of Biblical interpretation; it only postpones the problem since you now have to interpret the interpreter.

We might as well all face the fact that we cannot escape the problem of interpretation. And with the problem comes diversity. We are going to misunderstand some things. We just have to do the best we can to study the Bible and understand it correctly and be willing to live with the fact that we are fallible and might get some things wrong. That's the inescapable position we're in.

How to debunk Dhorpatan's argument against all gods

2010-08-13T18:29:00.005-04:00

I summarized some of the content of this blog entry in this video in case anybody wants something shorter.

After I wrote my last blog entry responding to the YouTube video, "How to prove God doesn't exist, in 3 minutes or less!," I recorded a video of myself reading the blog so I could post it as a reply and everybody who saw the video would be able to see my response. You can’t post url’s in youtube comments. Dhorpatan (the guy who made the video) responded in the comment section of my video, saying that I had misunderstood his argument. I had his definition of “infinity” wrong, and my syllogism did not accurately represent what he was saying. So I decided to write a more thorough critique of his video with his clarifications in mind. This is going to be a complete redo of my critique of his argument against the existence of god.

Dhorpatan wrote in the detail section under his video that “this may be one of the greatest, if not THE greatest argument for the non-existence of not just the Judeo-Christian God, or Creator Gods, but ALL Gods!!” Since the purpose of the video is to refute the existence of all gods, his attempt can be considered a failure if he leaves any of them unrefuted. I’ll argue that not only did he fail to refute the existence of all gods, but he doesn’t manage to refute the existence of any gods at all.

BTW, I’m using ‘god’ with a small ‘g’ since we are talking about all gods, not just some specific god. I’m also using the pronoun ‘he’ as a convention. For the sake of Dhorpatan’s argument, it doesn’t matter whether god is male, female, neither, both, personal, or impersonal.

What is Dhorpatan attempting to refute?

Dhorpatan attempts to refute the existence of both finite gods and infinite gods, since, by the law of excluded middle, that exhausts all the possibilities. First, he argues against the existence of a finite god. Then he argues against the existence of an infinite god. He suggests asking the CTCer (i.e. Christian, theist, or creationist), “Is God infinite?” Then he launches into his arguments.

Argument against finite gods

This is his argument against a finite god in his own words:

If they say ‘no’ then god is not infinite, then he is not beginingless, and will require a cause, refuting his being god, since by definition, god cannot be dependent on something external to himself. Further, he cannot be the first cause creator since a non-infinite god is limited and would thus not be sufficient to halt infinite regress. This falsifies the existence of god since it is a violation of Occam’s razor to needlessly multiply explanations beyond logical parsimony. And since god would not be sufficient to halt infinite regress, his supernatural existence would be a needless multiplication of explanations beyond natural inquiry.

First argument against finite gods

The first part of his argument can be summarized like so:

1. If a finite god exists, then he has a beginning.
2. If the finite god has a beginning, then he must have a cause.
3. If the finite god has a cause, then he is dependent on something external to himself.
4. By definition, no god can be dependent on something external to himself.
5. Therefore, a finite god does not exist.

This is a deductive argument, and there are only two ways a deductive argument can go wrong. If at least one of the premises is false, then the argument fails. If the conclusion does not follow logically from the premises, then the logic is invalid, and the argument fails.

Let me say first of all that the logic in this argument is impeccable. It is definitely logically valid. I had to add the third premise to make his argument valid because that’s not exactly how he put it, but I don’t think he will object. He shouldn’t, anyway. I also tweaked the fourth premise for the sake of precision. Again, he shouldn’t object.

Let me also say that I agree with his second and third premises. I think his first and fourth premises are false, and that’s why his argument fails.

Let’s look at his first premise:

1. If a finite god exists, then he has a beginning.

Unfortunately, Dhorpatan didn’t give us a definition for “infinite.” Nor did he give us a reason for why we should think this premise is true. In my first response, I said that by “infinite,” he appeared to mean “beginningless.” After all, the contrapositive to this premise is: “If God is beginningless, then god is infinite.”

Let me make a detour here and explain what a “contrapositive” is. I’m not trying to insult anybody’s intelligence. It’s just that a lot of people don’t know what that means. The contrapositive to an if/then statement is a logically equivalent statement. “If P then Q” means the same thing as “If not Q, then not P.” You can demonstrate this by using modus tollens.

If P then Q.
Not Q
Therefore, not P.

Assuming the first premise is true (If P then Q), it follows that if the second premise is true, then the conclusion is true, since the conclusion follows from the first and second premise. In other words, it follows that “If not Q, then not P.”

Well, Dhorpatan corrected me about the relationship between beginninglessness and infinity. In the comment section of my video, he said, “Something that is beginningless is not necessarily infinite.” Then he used the laws of logic as an example of something that is beginningless but not infinite. What I want to point out is that Dhorpatan has unwittingly refuted his first premise. If his first premise is true, then it’s necessarily also true (by contrapositive) that if something is beginningless, then it is infinite. Since he has pointed out a counter-example to the contrapositive of his first premise, it follows that his first premise is false. And if his first premise is false, then his whole argument fails.

He could reword his first premise to be consistent with his statement and his counter-example. It would then read, “If a finite god exists, then it’s possible for him to have a beginning.” But of course that would invalidate his whole argument. To make it logically valid, he’d have to tweak the other premises to include mere possibility, and his conclusion would be, “A finite god could possibly not exist.” If the best his argument can achieve is to make the non-existence of a finite god possible, then his argument fails to show that a finite god does not exist. So by saying, “Something that is beginningless is not necessarily infinite,” Dhorpatan has refuted his argument against a finite god.

Maybe we could salvage his argument, though. Since he says that beginningless things are not necessarily infinite, maybe there are some cases where if something is beginningless, then it is infinite. We could salvage his first premise if somehow god turned out to be one of those special cases where if he is finite, then he is beginningless. Dhorpatan would have to provide us with an argument to that effect, though. He could not argue like so:

Anything that is finite must have a beginning.
God is finite.
Therefore, god must have a beginning.

He could not make that argument because he has already given us a counter-example to the first premise, namely the laws of logic. To salvage his argument, Dhorpatan needs to explain to us why god being finite means god must have a beginning, but the same rule does not apply to the laws of logic. Since Dhorpatan didn’t even attempt to defend this distinction, I can only guess at what his reasoning might be.

First, we should explore why he thinks god being finite must mean that he has a beginning. Although he didn’t give a definition for “infinity” in his video, he did tell me what he meant in the comment section of my video response. He defined “infinite” as "having no limits in time, space, extent or magnitude.” Perhaps he thinks a finite god must have a beginning because if god is finite, then he is limited in duration. He has only existed for a finite amount of time, and therefore has a beginning. How, then, might the laws of logic be finite, and not have a beginning? I suppose Dhorpatan could say that the laws of logic are timeless—they have no temporal component at all, neither a finite nor an infinite one. The only problem is that his argument against a finite god would then only apply to temporally finite gods. It would not apply to timeless gods, and would leave them unrefuted.

Dhorpatan could fix that problem by arguing, as William Lane Craig does, that god must be temporal if he is to have any kind of relationship with the physical cosmos. But there are problems with that, too. First, Dhorpatan’s argument against a finite god would do nothing to refute deistic finite gods, since deistic gods do not interact with the physical cosmos. Second, if god is the cause for the beginning of the space-time continuum, then god could be timeless without creation and temporal with creation. In that case, god could be temporal and yet beginningless.

Perhaps Dhorpatan has some reason to think there couldn’t be a beginningless finite god, and I just haven’t been able to guess what that reason might be. But we can demonstrate from premises that Dhorpatan has given us himself that there can be a beginningless finite god (finite in the sense of having a limited duration in time). Let’s look at his second and third premises:

2. If the finite god has a beginning, then he must have a cause.
3. If the finite god has a cause, then he is dependent on something external to himself.

If these premises apply to anything that has a beginning and anything that has a cause, then there must be a beginningless creator that is finite with respect to duration. Let me explain. Remember that Dhorpatan defined “infinite” as "having no limits in time, space, extent or magnitude.” So if something has no limit in extent, then it is infinite. Dhorpatan laters tells us that actual infinites cannot exist in the universe. So we can make the following argument:

1. If time does not have a beginning, then time is unlimited in extent.
2. If something has no limit in extent, then it is infinite.
3. An actual infinite cannot exist in the universe.
4. Therefore, time must have a beginning.

If something which has a beginning must have a cause, then time must have a cause. And if something which has a cause must be dependent on something external to itself, then the cause must be external to time. In other words, it must be timeless. So, using Dhorpatan’s own premises and definition, we have shown that something timeless brought time into existence. Since it’s possible that a temporally finite god is what brought time into existence, Dhorpatan’s argument against a finite god fails.

But his argument fails for another reason. His fourth premise is also false:

4. By definition, no god can be dependent on something external to himself.

His definition of god is too restrictive. There are all kinds of gods that are dependent on something external to themselves. All of the Greek and Roman gods were dependent on something external to themselves. Many of them were procreated. The Mormon god is also dependent on something external to himself. So clearly “god” has a much broader meaning than Dhorpatan has allowed. Since his fourth premise is false, his argument against a finite god fails.

There just doesn’t seem to be any way to salvage Dhorpatan’s argument against all finite gods. If there is, and if I just haven’t thought of it, then Dhorpatan needs to make another video, because the video with its present content is woefully inadequate.

Second argument against finite gods

Let’s move on to the second part of his argument against a finite god. It can be summarized like so:

1. If god is finite, then god is limited.
2. If god is limited, then god would not be able to halt an infinite regress.
3. If god is not able to halt an infinite regress, then god’s supernatural existence would be a needless multiplication of explanations beyond natural inquiry.
4. If god’s supernatural existence is a needless multiplication of explanations beyond natural inquiry, then god’s existence violates Occam’s razor.
5. Therefore, if god is finite, then god’s existence violates Occam’s razor.

The first premise lacks precision. While it’s true that if god were finite in some sense then he would be limited in that same sense. But Dhorpatan doesn’t tell us in what way God would have to be limited if he were finite. The problem with this lack of precision will become clear when we look at the second premise.

The second premise is false. If god were limited with respect to his personhood (i.e. he is a finite number of persons), it would not follow that god is unable to halt an infinite regress. God would have to be limited in some particular sense before it would follow that god is not able to halt an infinite regress. Since it’s possible for god to be limited in some way and still be able to halt an infinite regress, his second premise is false.

This is probably a good place for me to add that his definition of “infinite” also lacks precision. Let me explain what I mean. Let’s suppose I am able to eat a whole sandwich. It would follow that I am not limited by any inability to eat the sandwich. By Dhorpatan’s definition of infinite, you could argue that I am infinite since I have no limitations that prevent me from eating the sandwich, neither in extent, nor magnitude. Surely that is silly. That’s why philosophers and mathematicians don’t use google to come up with their definitions, as Dhorpatan apparently did.

The second premise is also false because, as we’ve shown, god could be limited in duration and still halt an infinite regress. If god is what caused time to come into existence, then god does halt an infinite regress.

His third premise is incoherent. The only way god’s supernatural existence could be a needless explanation is if (1) we have something that needs to be explained, and (2) we have something to explain it with other than god. So what on earth is he talking about? Maybe the thing that needs to be explained is the existence of the physical cosmos. Or maybe we need to explain the beginning of time or the beginning of events since there can’t be an infinite regress. But what else has Dhorpatan suggested to halt an infinite regress? Nothing, as far as I can see. If Dhorpatan doesn’t give us something to halt an infinite regress, god cannot be a needless explanation, and his third premise is false.

The fourth premise is more or less true by definition, but it lacks precision. I’ll just let it slide, though, since this post is already getting too long.

Now we get to the conclusion—that the existence of god violates Occam’s razor. Notice that the conclusion is not that a finite god does not exist. If Dhorpatan wanted to add that if something violates Occam’s razor, it therefore doesn’t exist, then his argument would be fallacious since that doesn’t follow. All Occam’s razor tells us is that any hypothetical entity we propose to explain some phenomenon that is already fully accounted for must be unjustified.

For example, let’s say I have an unassembled tent that I leave on the ground while I go use the bathroom. When I come back, I find that the tent has been assembled, and I need an explanation for how it got to be assembled. In that case, I am justified in inferring that at least one person set my tent up. Since one person is sufficient to explain how my tent got put up, Occam’s razor only allows me to infer one person. I’m not justified in inferring two or three people. But obviously it doesn’t follow that, therefore, only one person set the tent up. There may have been three or four people who set the tent up for all I know.

There are things that exist that we don’t know about because we haven’t discovered them yet. Since we don’t know about them, they obviously have no explanatory power for us. But clearly that does not mean they don’t exist. We have no phenomenon that we need unicorns to explain, but it doesn’t follow that no unicorns exist. It only follows that we are unjustified in inferring that they must.

So this argument from Occam’s razor does not support the claim that god does not exist. At best, it only works as a rebuttal to some phantom argument for the existence of god that Dhorpatan doesn’t tells us about. We can’t assess whether god is an unnecessary explanation in that phantom argument since Dhorpatan doesn’t tell us what the argument is. So we can just mark this whole Occam’s razor argument out. It’s irrelevant to Dhorpatan’s case against god.

Argument against infinite gods

Let’s move on to his argument against an infinite god. This is his argument in response to the question, “Is God infinite?”:

If they say ‘yes’ that God is infinite, then their God does not exist since actual infinites cannot subsist within the universe.

Dhorpatan didn’t like the way I characterized this argument in my previous blog/video. This is how I previously characterized the argument:

1. An actual infinite cannot exist in the universe.
2. God is an actual infinite.
3. Therefore, God cannot exist in the universe.

He objected to this characterization by saying, “your syllogism was a strawman, as I don't say God is actually infinite.” Of course, since he doesn’t believe in any god, it follows that he doesn’t believe god is infinite or finite. But the second premise only represents the definition of the god he is attempting to refute. So I insist that the argument does accurately represent what he is arguing. But I will characterize the argument differently to avoid his silly objection. Here’s the new characterization.

1. If an infinite god exists, then an actual infinite exists in the universe.
2. An actual infinite cannot exist in the universe.
3. Therefore, an infinite god cannot exist.

That is not exactly how he worded it, but surely he won’t object to this characterization. You can read his words for yourself and see that it accurately represents what he is arguing.

Let’s look at that first premise. One possible rebuttal is that God does not exist in the universe. If God doesn’t exist in the universe, then the first premise is false. Dhorpatan addresses this rebuttal later in the video. He says:

There is no outside the universe. The universe is existence. This rebuttal fails since it’s trying to baselessly assert that God exists outside of existence. Something that exists outside of existence doesn’t exist.

When I first read this, it struck me as a blaring case of begging the question. Since most theists make a distinction between the creator and the creation, and since the universe is the creation, it follows that the creator is not in or part of the universe. So the issue under dispute between theists and atheists is whether the universe is all that exists. But Dhorpatan’s refutation is based on the assumption that the universe is all that exists. There can be no clearer case of circular reasoning.

But as it turns out, I misunderstood what Dhorpatan was arguing. By saying the universe is existence, Dhorpatan was not making a synthetic statement; rather, he was making an analytic statement. In other words, he was just giving us a definition of the universe. He was telling us how he is using the word. In the comment section of his video, he said, “The Universe is defined by several credible sources as everything that exists.”

I suspect that Dhorpatan has just misunderstood what he has read. There are some authorities, like Carl Sagan, who have said the universe is all that ever was or will be. But they are not making analytic statements in those cases. They are not defining the universe. Rather, they were making metaphysical claims about reality. Their statements are synthetic. Usually, when anybody talks about the universe, they are referring to the entire space/time continuum, the physical cosmos, the sum total of space, time, and matter/energy. Whether there is anything other than the universe is a philosophical question.

But what’s important is not how the universe ought to be defined, but how Dhorptan is using the word “universe.” He is using the word as a synonym for “reality.” So we can substitute “reality” for all his uses of “universe” to avoid misunderstanding him. His argument would then be:

1. If an infinite god exists, then an actual infinite exists in reality.
2. An actual infinite cannot exist in reality.
3. Therefore, an infinite god cannot exist.

This avoids the objection that God does not exist in the universe. No theist is going to say, “God does not exist in reality,” and offer that as a rebuttal to Dhorpatan’s argument, because that would be to concede Dhorpatan’s argument.

The first premise appears at first glance to be an obvious truth. It’s almost a tautology. But it really depends on what is meant by “infinite” and “actual infinite.” For example, if a potentially infinite god exists, it wouldn’t follow that an actual infinite exists. A god who was constantly learning could be potentially infinite as his knowledge approached infinity, but it wouldn’t follow that an actual infinite exists in reality. So the only way the first premise can be true is if “infinite” means the same thing in both cases.

Likewise, his argument can only be valid if he is using “infinite” in the second premises just like he is using it in the first premise. If god is infinite in some sense other than Dhorpatan means when he says an actual infinite cannot exist, then his argument commits the fallacy of equivocation, and is invalid.

That’s what I accused him of in my first blog/video. Typically, when people say that actual infinites cannot exist in reality, they mean specifically that there cannot be an actually infinite number of things. But when theists say god is infinite, they do not mean it in that sense. Since Dhorpatan didn’t define “infinite” in his video, I just assumed he was using “infinite” in the senses they are typically used in the context of god and in the context of the impossibility of actual infinites.

He corrected me, though, and said that in both cases, he was using infinite to mean “having no limits in time, space, extent or magnitude.” Unfortunately, Dhorpatan’s definition is not precise enough to do any work for him. Dhorpatan made no distinction between potential infinites and actual infinites. Neither did he make any distinction between qualitative infinites and quantitative infinites, which he admits in the comment section of my first video.

While most people might accept that an actual quantitative infinite cannot exist in reality, I don’t think most people would accept that a qualitative infinite cannot exist in reality either. But many people don’t even accept that an actual quantitative infinite cannot exist in reality. Dhorpatan’s premise, then, is highly controversial. Yet he offers it without any substantiation. Without some kind of argument to support the premise that an actual infinite cannot exist in reality, Dhorpatan’s argument doesn’t disprove the existence of an infinite god.

Given the broad range of infinities that can be captured under his definition of “infinite,” his second premise just isn’t true. There are some infinities that fit his definition, but that can exist in reality. For example, if god is all powerful, then there is no limit to the extent of what he can do. But there is no reason to think that kind of infinite couldn’t exist.

Somebody may object, and say that God cannot engage in logical absurdity. He can’t create square circles or married bachelors, and he can’t make necessarily false statements true. But these are artificial limitations because the scenarios are incoherent. I know what a square is, and I know what a circle is, but I don’t know what a square circle is. “Square circle” is an incoherent combination of words. It isn’t clear what god is being asked to do, or what the world would look like if he could do it. It isn’t because of a lack of power that God can’t engage in logical absurdity. It’s because the scenarios themselves are nonsense. When we say god is all powerful, it means that he can do anything that actually makes sense, and that is meaningful.

There is a sense in which an all knowing god’s knowledge is infinite, and a sense in which it is not infinite. It is infinite in the sense that it is exhaustive. If god knows all true propositions, then there is no limit to the scope and extent of what god knows. But if there are only a finite number of true propositions, then you could say god’s knowledge is finite in number, even though it was exhaustive. There is no reason to suppose that such a god could not exist.

God is sometimes said to be qualitatively infinite because he had no beginning, or because he is a necessary being. As we’ve seen, though, Dhorpatan accepts the existence of at least some things that do not have beginnings, namely the laws of logic. The laws of logic are also necessary, so Dhorpatan would also have to accept the existence of necessary beings. It’s impossible for there not to be something in existence that is necessary. If anything exists at all, then something must be necessary because that’s the only way to halt a numerically infinite regress of explanations for contingent things. If Dhorpatan accepts the existence of necessary things that have no beginning, then he cannot dismiss the existence of god just because god is necessary and beginningless.

The sense in which Christians say that God is infinite is that God has certain attributes to a maximum degree. He is all powerful in the sense that he can do all things logically possible. He is all knowing in the sense that he knows all true propositions. He is uncreated. He is necessary. If Dhorpatan wants to disprove the Christian God, then he needs to explain why we should think that an infinite God in this sense cannot exist. It just won’t do to say that God’s temporal duration is finite, since the Christian God is causally prior to time, and is therefore beginningless. It won’t do to say that an actually infinite quantity cannot exist in reality since the Christian God is not actually infinite in that sense, and none of his attributes entail the existence of an actually infinite number of things.

Dhorpatan could say that if all these senses in which we say god is infinite (knowledge, power, necessity, etc.) are not really what he means by infinite, then he would have to place our god in the “finite” category, which he addressed in the first part of his video. But as we’ve seen, that argument fails. So Dhorpatan has failed to refute the existence of any god.

In fact, it would be hard to accept all of Dhorpatan’s premises and not arrive at the existence of some sort of creator god. If time had no beginning, the past would be an actually infinite collection of equal intervals of time. There would be an actually infinite number of minutes and of seconds. If an actual infinite cannot exist in reality, then time must have a beginning. Dhorpatan claims that if god has a beginning, then god will require a cause. Unless he has some reason to make a distinction, it seems that time would also require a cause. That means a timeless entity brought time into existence.

It turns out that the whole physical cosmos must have a beginning, because the cosmos is space/time. It’s the sum total of space, time, and matter/energy. It’s in a constant state of change, and change requires cause. Since there cannot be an actual infinite in reality, it follows that the causal chain in the physical cosmos must have a beginning. And if it has a beginning, then it must have a cause. So something spaceless, timeless, and immaterial must have brought the physical cosmos into existence.

Since Dhorpatan does not believe in actual infinites, he cannot rationally believe in infinite regresses. And if he doesn’t believe in infinite regresses, then he must believe in an uncaused first cause. The uncaused first cause is a necessary, uncaused, spaceless, timeless, and immaterial creator of the cosmos. It follows necessarily from Dhorpatan’s own premises, so it’s irrational for him to deny the existence of such an entity. And it would be a strange kind of atheism to accept such a thing.

Rebuttals

At the end of his video, Dhorpatan addressed three rebuttals to his argument against an infinite god, so let’s look at those.

The first rebuttal is that “God is spiritual, and is therefore not bound by the realities of non-spiritual entities.” Dhorpatan’s refutation is exactly right. The second premise—that actual infinities cannot exist in the universe—encompasses all of reality, whether spiritual or not. So this rebuttal makes an irrelevant distinction.

The second rebuttal is that “God created the universe, so he is not bound by the laws and limitations of it.” Dhorpatan responded by saying that “anything that exists within the universe is logically bound by the laws and limitations of it since positing otherwise will violate the law of non-contradiction.” There’s a confusion here about the meaning of “universe.” Somebody who offered this objection could not be using Dhorpatan’s meaning, because that would be to say that god created reality. And if god is real, that would mean god created himself, which is nonsense. What they mean, instead, is that God created the physical cosmos, and is therefore not bound by its rules. But that objection fails because the rule in question—the impossible of an actual infinite—applies to all of reality, not just the physical cosmos. And Dhorpatan is right to say that it is a contradiction to say that a rule which applies to all of reality does not apply to all of reality, god being the exception.

The third rebuttal is that “God is outside the universe, and is therefore not bound by the realities that beings inside the universe would be subject to.” We have already addressed this subject above.

There ye have it. Maybe I’ve made some mistakes in thinking somewhere, but hopefully it’s at least obvious that Dhorpatan’s argument needs a little more meat.

How to prove God does not exist

2010-08-01T13:10:00.003-04:00

It has been my observation that the majority of atheists who attempt to defend their atheism choose to defend weak atheism (mere lack of belief in God) rather than strong atheism (the positive view that God does not exist). And among those who actually defend strong atheism, it has been my observation that the majority of them defend it more with bluster than with carefully thought out logical argumentation. It is very refreshing for me to see an exception from time to time. This video attempts to defend strong atheism, and to do it carefully and logically. I really appreciate that.

And since I have such an appreciation for the attempt, I think it deserves a response.

He begins with the law of excluded middle. God is either infinite or God is not infinite. By "infinite" he appears to mean "beginningless." If God is not infinite, then God had a beginning, which means God must've had a cause to his existence, which is clearly unacceptable to most versions of theism, not to mention unparsimonious. So the only viable option for theists (especially Jews, Christians, and Muslims) is that God is infinite, i.e. beginningless. I totally agree with him so far.

The next part is the crux of his whole argument. He argues like so:

1. Actual infinities cannot exist in the universe.
2. God is actually infinite.
3. Therefore, God cannot exist in the universe.

I would take his first premise a step farther and say that actual infinities cannot exist in reality, whether in the universe or not. That would avoid the objection that God does not exist in the universe, which he attempts to answer later in the video.

But the problem with his argument is that it commits the fallacy of equivocation. He is equivocating on "infinity." When he says that infinities cannot exist in the universe, he means there cannot be an actually infinite number of things in the universe. But, of course, when theists say that God is infinite, they do not mean that God is an actually infinite number of things. God is only one thing. Trinitarians say that God is three persons. Personally, I don't know what most theists mean when they say God is infinite, but since the person who made this video equates "inifinity" with "beginninglessness," I can only assume he means that God has existed for an infinite amount of time.

Let's pursue that. To avoid equivocation, he would have to be saying in his first premise that the universe as a whole, as well as everything in the universe, must have a beginning. It cannot have existed for an infinite amount of time, because time itself cannot be infinite, i.e. beginningless. But that presents problems for his argument because he previously argued that if God is not infinite, then God must have a cause, which means God cannot halt an infinite regress. But the same problem is true of the universe. If the universe had a beginning, then by his reasoning, the universe, too, needs a cause. How will he avoid an infinite regress?

There's another problem with his argument. The second premise--that God is infinite--is based on the notion that God is beginningless. Beginningless, then, amounts to an actual infinite. But is that true? If something does not have a beginning, does that mean it has existed for an actually infinite amount of time? I would say not, because if time itself had a beginning, then whatever caused time to begin to exist, cannot have come into existence with time. Since it is causally prior to time, it is beginningless, even though it has only existed for a finite amount of time. And that's exactly what William Lane Craig has been arguing for years. Since it is possible for God to be beginningless, even though God hasn't existed for an infinite amount of time, it is fallacious to invoke the impossibility of an actual infinite to disprove the existence of a beginningless God.

Next in the video, he answers possible objections. He brings up three rebuttals that all basically amount to the same thing--God is not bound by the laws of the universe. Basically what this amounts to is that since "infinities cannot exist" is a law that applies merely to the universe, and since God isn't bound by those laws, that God can be infinite. I agree with him that these rebuttals are fallacious, but disagree with him about why they are fallacious. I think they are fallacious because "infinities cannot exist" is not merely a law of the universe, but a metaphysical law that applies to all of reality, whether in the universe or not. So it won't do to say God can be infinite just because he's not bound by the laws of the universe. It is logic that prevents actual infinities, not the physical properties of space, time, and matter.

But let's look at his rebuttals anyway.

The first objection is that since God is spiritual, he isn't bound by the same things non-spiritual things are bound by--presumably meaning he can be actually infinite even though nothing else can. The rebuttal is that it doesn't matter whether God is spiritual or not, since either way, God is real, and if God is real, then he can't exist within the universe. What exactly is the objection here? I admit I had to think about that for a while. Of course nobody claims that God is part of the universe, so his rebuttal doesn't seem to work at all. Maybe he's objecting to the doctrine of God's omnipresence, since that would require that God is located within the universe. But even if that were true, what has that got to do with the limitations of actual infinities? I confess I don't know.

The second objection is that since God created the universe, he isn't bound by its rules. He says this argument fails because anything in the universe is bound by its rules. If you say otherwise, you are violating the law of non-contradiction. There seems to me to be two problems with this rebuttal. First, the objection does not assume God is in the universe, only that since he created it, he is not bound by its rules. Second, even if the impossibility of actual infinities applies only to the universe, it is far from obvious that it must apply to anything in the universe since it seems at least possible that something which entered the universe from the outside may retain some of its properties. In case I'm not being clear, let me use an analogy. Let's suppose I've got a glass of water. Since water has certain properties (e.g. being a liquid), I can say that anything in my glass has these certain properties of water. But of course it wouldn't follow that anything I put in the glass must also have those properties just because I put it in the glass. Putting a spoon in the glass wouldn't make the spoon a liquid. In the same way, putting God in the universe wouldn't force God to take on all the properties of the universe.

The third objection is that God exists outside of the universe, and is therefore not limited by its rules. His rebuttal is a blatant case of begging the question against God's existence. He simply defines the universe as "everything that exists," and then excludes the existence of God since God is said to be outside the universe. Well, of course if you begin with the assumption of naturalism, you're going to arrive at the negation of anything supernatural, including God. Whether the universe is, in fact, all that exists is the issue under dispute. If God exists, then it isn't true that the universe is the only thing that exists.

In the comment section he responded to one person by saying that several credible sources define the universe as "everything that exists." Well, first of all, that's not a definition of the universe. It's a philosophical point of view about reality. Second, definitions are not arrived at by experts discovering them. Definitions are conventional. Third, as any critic of the ontological argument knows, you cannot define things in and out of existence. Fourth, several authorities define the universe as the sum total of space, time, and matter/energy, not as "everything that exists."

How does the resurrection of Jesus prove that he is the messiah?

2010-07-15T22:26:00.000-04:00

I watched a short clip on youtube of a debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens asked Craig if Craig believed the story in Matthew about all the saints coming to life and walking around Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified. His point was that even if Jesus was raised from the dead, that doesn't prove anything about Jesus being the messiah or the son of God since lots of other people were raised from the dead, too. If the resurrection of these saints doesn't mean that they are divine or messianic or anything like that, then the resurrection of Jesus doesn't either.

Pinchas Lapide made the same point in his book on the resurrection of Jesus. He believed Jesus was raised from the dead, but he said that didn't mean Jesus was the messiah since lots of other people had been raised from the dead. Elijah raised people from the dead, for example.

I've heard this same argument made from other people, too, so I thought I'd blog on it and tell you how I think the resurrection of Jesus proves that Jesus was the messiah.

There are two differences between Jesus' resurrection and all these other resurrections. First, Jesus made lofty claims about himself, but none of these other people did. Second, no human so much as claimed to have raised Jesus from the dead. (There's a third difference--Jesus was raised to immortality, but the others were still mortal. But that's not a relevant difference for the sake of my argument.)

If Elijah claims to be a prophet, and then he raises somebody from the dead, it seems to me that says more about Elijah than it says about the person Elijah raised. Likewise, when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, that says more about Jesus than it says about Lazarus. Well, there was no human agency in the resurrection of Jesus. I'm pretty sure that if there had been, that person would've been thought of as special enough to have mentioned somewhere in the literature that has come down to us. But it looks like not only was there no human agent involved, but nobody so much as claimed to have been involved. So who raised Jesus from the dead? Well, by process of elimination, it must've been some kind of supernatural entity.

If some ordinary guy who just blended in with everybody else, never seemed special, never claimed to be special, etc., died and then came back to life three days later, we might all think there was something special about him, but what? Without some context, it's hard to pour any specific significance into the situation. Maybe it's just some weird anomaly. After all, quantum physicists tell us it's at least possible that every subatomic particle in your body could simultaneously move in the same direction by the same distance at the same time, and then you would appear to magically relocate. Chances are against it, but it's at least possible. Maybe that's what happened here.

But Jesus made unusual claims about himself. That's not to say other people didn't make similar claims, but when you look at all the people who have lived in died, most people don't make those kinds of claims about themselves. Jesus at least claimed to be the messiah. However unlikely it is that Jesus would make such a claim, and however unlikely it is that somebody would rise from the dead, it seems next to impossible that these two unlikely events would both happen with the same person. So I think it's far more reasonable to believe that there is a connection between Jesus' claim to be the messiah and his resurrection from the dead than it is to believe it's just a big coincidence that both of these things are true about the same person.

But Jesus didn't just make claims about himself. He also made claims about his Father, God. Jesus was deeply committed to glorifying his father, to advancing his kingdom, and to keeping his law. Granted, it's possible some trickster of a supernatural being raised Jesus from the dead to make everybody believe in the God of Jesus, and to believe in Jesus himself, it seems far more reasonable to believe that the same God that Jesus preached is the very God who raised Jesus from the dead. And, if so, that vindicates Jesus' claims about himself.

White and Ehrman on textual criticism

2010-07-12T22:19:00.003-04:00

I have a PDF copy of a transcript of a debate between James White and Bart Ehrman on the reliability of the New Testament text.

This was a really interesting debate. But in the end, I thought the whole debate came down to one question which was never adequately answered (or even asked) by either side. The question is this: How likely is it that more than one copy was made from the autographs?

You see, if it turns out that only one copy was made from the autographs, and then the autographs were lost, then no amount of textual criticism can reconstruct what the autographs said. The best we can do is reconstruct what the earliest copy said from which multiple copies were made. If the first copy made from the original Matthew had any mistakes in it, and if that’s the only copy that was ever made (or the only copy whose progeny survived), then it would be impossible to ever reconstruct exactly what the original said.

According to James White, since we have multiple lineages of copies, and all these copies go back to an original source, then not only are all the mistakes carried forward, but whatever was in the original was carried forward as well. Whenever you have a multitude of textual variants for one passage, the original version will be among them. So White believes that the entirety of the autographs have been preserved somewhere among all of our manuscript evidence. But that is only true if multiple copies were made from the original. It’s not true if only one copy was made from the original and the one copy had mistakes.

I don’t think Erhman was arguing, necessarily, that there was only one copy made from each document. He was just arguing that since it’s possible, and since we can only reconstruct the earliest copy from which multiple copies were made and lineages survived, that we cannot be sure that our reconstruction perfectly reflects what the originals said. He made it sound worse than that, though. In his scenario, there was one copy from the autograph, and then one copy of that copy, and then one copy of that copy. And the final copy was copied multiple times. So we can only reconstruct a copy of a copy of a copy, but never the autograph.

So it all comes down to that one question. How likely is it that more than one copy was made of the original autographs? What do you think?

The difference between compatibilism and determinism

2010-06-18T13:17:00.002-04:00

Compatibilism is sometimes called soft determinism. It is distinguished from hard determinism. William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, and other libertarians sometimes argue that compatibilism reduces to hard determinism, and there really is no meaningful difference. I don't remember if it was Craig or Moreland (I think it was Moreland), but one of them compared compatibilism to a row of white dominoes where one domino was red. The red domino was supposed to represent the will--the faculty of volition. Since the will is causally determined by prior factors, such as motive, desire, belief, etc., then it's just one domino in a strictly deterministic causal chain. The redness of the domino makes no difference.

I think the major (and quite obvious) difference between compatibilism and hard determinism is that in hard determinism, the causal chain is made up entirely of non-rational, blind, mechanistic cause and effect, but in compatibilism, there is a mental component to the causal chain that includes a person's own desires, motives, inclinations, and intentions. And that is not an irrelevant difference.

The problem with reducing compatibilism to hard determinism is that if naturalism were true then compatibilism could not be true, but hard determinism could. The reason is that in compatibilism, mental events are able to have causal influence in the physical world. Things like motives and desires are mental events that have causal influence over the brain. If naturalism is true, then hard determinism would be true, but not compatibilism.

As Moreland often likes to point out, the indiscernibility of identicals dictates that if there is any property A and B do not have in common, then A and B cannot be the same thing. Since I've pointed out a rather obvious difference between hard determinism and compatibilism, it follows that they cannot be the same thing.

A person might respond by saying that even though there's a difference between a white domino and a red domino, it is not a significant difference. But significant with respect to what? I don't remember all the relevant differences Craig and Moreland pointed to, but there are three I can think of--an argument for the soul, rationality, morality.

An argument for the soul

In Scaling the Secular City, Moreland made the following argument:

1. If all we are is the sum of our physical parts, then we cannot have free will.
2. We do have free will.
3. Therefore, we are not merely the sum of our physical parts.

The reason Moreland used free will as an argument against physicalism is because physicalism entails determinism. But if we have a soul that stands outside of the physical world, but has causal influence over it, then it's possible to have free will. In fact, that's the only way we could have free will.

But you don't need free will to make this argument work. All you need is for mental events to have causal influence over the brain, which is possible under both libertarian free will and compatibilism.

1. If all we are is the sum of our physical parts, then mental events cannot have causal influence over physical events.
2. Mental events can have causal influence over physical events.
3. Therefore, we are not merely the sum of our physical parts.

Rationality

Moreland has argued that free will is necessary for rationality. But in other places he has argued that our beliefs are not under the control of the will. I asked him about that on the Alaska cruise, and he explained that although our beliefs are not under the direct control of the will, we do nevertheless choose to follow arguments, choose to think thoughts, choose to expose ourselves to belief-changing situations, etc., and our beliefs can change as a result. And that's what makes us rational.

But this account doesn't explain why it is necessary to have libertarian freedom in order to be rational. It seems to me that if my choice to follow an argument and think about its premises is the result of my desire to arrive at the truth, then I am being rational. And if my belief is the result of "seeing" the logical relation between statements such as "All men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man," then it seems to me that I'm being rational.

Morality

Craig, Moreland, and most (all?) libertarians think libertarian free will is necessary for morality and compatibilism or determinism is inconsistent with morality. I've already argued otherwise in my series on "An Argument Against Morality From Determinism," in May of 2005, but I'll give a brief response here.

According to libertarians, if our choices are determined by our desires and motives, then we can be worthy of neither praise or blame. If that's true, then the stronger our motives and desires are, the less culpable we are. The reason is because the stronger our motives and desires are, the more difficult it is to resist giving into them, and the more difficult it is to resist giving into them, the closer they are to determining our choices. It follows from this point of view, that the more full of hate and malice a person is, the less blameworthy they are. And the more full of love and kindness a person is, the less worthy of praise they are.

That's what follows from the libertarian view, but the libertarians have it entirely backwards. We all recognize intuitively that being a rotten person consists in having rotten desires, and the more rotten a person's desires, they more wicked they are for acting on them, and the more we blame them. And the more kind a person is, the more we praise them. An act that arises spontaneously for no reason at all can be worthy of neither praise nor blame, but we praise people or blame them because they do exactly what their wanted to do. The less hand their own desires have in bringing about their behavior, the less control we say they have over their actions. But the more hand their own desires have in bringing about their behavior, the more control we say they have over their actions. It follows that people are the most culpable for their actions when their actions are completely determined by their desires. Compatibilism makes sense out of moral responsibility. Libertarianism doesn't.

Three kinds of oughts

2010-05-31T12:44:00.002-04:00

I've been putting this blog off for a long time because there was a fourth kind of ought I wanted to talk about, but I can't remember what it was.

Anyway, there are three kinds of oughts--the rational ought, the pragmatic ought, and the moral ought. And the reason I'm telling you about this is because in a lot of discussions (especially discussions over the grounding problem in morality), I see these different kinds of oughts conflated, which results of the participants talking past each other. I thought maybe if I could get the word out about these distinctions in "oughts" that maybe the conversation could move forward a bit.

The rational ought is like when you say, "You ought to believe that two and two make four." The rational ought comes from the fact that reality is a certain way and that sometimes given certain premises, the rational thing to do is believe a certain proposition that follows from the premises. A person who believes that all men are mortal and that Socrates is a man ought also to believe that Socrates is mortal.

A pragmatic ought is like when you say, "You ought to change the oil in your car." You're not doing anything immoral by not changing the oil in your car, but it's still a good idea for practical reasons. The pragmatic ought comes from the fact that some things are in your best interest or they serve your purposes. You ought, in the pragmatic sense, to save money, eat well, stay in school, etc.

A moral ought is like when you say, "You ought to be faithful to you wife." The moral ought comes from the fact that we all have obligations or imperatives that are imposed on us. We ought, in the moral sense, to be kind, generous, fair, and honest.

All of these oughts can be expressed using other words, such as good, bad, should, shouldn't, right, and wrong. Here are some examples:

The rational ought

'B' is a good answer to the question.
You should believe the man is guilty because there's good evidence for it.
That answer is not right.

The pragmatic ought

Saving money for retirement is a good idea.
You should save money for retirement.
[Hmm, maybe "right" and "wrong" don't work well with the pragmatic ought.]

The moral ought

It is good to be honest.
You should be honest with people.
Being honest is the right thing to do.

It is easy to conflate the moral ought with the pragmatic ought because most of the time, the moral thing to do is the pragmatic thing to do. If we all lived morally, the world would be a happier place. We'd all be better off.

That isn't always the case, though. It might be a good idea in the pragmatic sense to kill somebody, because it would help everybody else ought by relieving them of a burden. But it could still be wrong. And it might be right to be honest with somebody even if there are disadvantages in doing so.

In debates about the grounding question of morality, I have often seen people explain the pragmatic ought thinking they have given grounds for the moral ought. In answer to the question, "Why be moral?" atheists will sometimes answer that acting in a way that people call "moral" is in our best interest. If we don't want people to steal from us, we ought not steal from them. But, of course, that doesn't mean it's morally wrong to steal from people; it just means stealing is a bad idea in the pragmatic sense. A person who attempts to ground morality in practical advantages isn't really grounding morality at all since they are only explaining pragmatic oughts, and not moral oughts.

The crucifixion

2010-05-21T14:20:00.001-04:00

There are a number of scholars from the entire range of the liberal/conservative spectrum who have said the most certain thing we can know about Jesus is that the Romans executed him by crucifixion. I don't know what all their individual reasons are for saying that, but I'll tell you what I think is the strongest reason.

The early Christians thought Jesus was the Christ. He was the fulfillment of the promises given to Israel to always have a man on the throne of David. By claiming to be the Christ, Jesus was essentially claiming to be the promised king of Israel. It was natural, then, that people would expect him to redeem Israel--to run the Romans off and reestablish Israel's national sovereignty and to usher in the kingdom of God on earth.

Now think about this. How likely is it that a group of Jews would make up a story about a christ and include in the story that the christ was killed by Israel's enemies? And they didn't even say he was killed heroically in battle. Rather, they came up with the most humiliating way for a criminal to die--by public crucifixion. And then they went about trying to win people over to this criminal-on-the-cross. I think that is an absurd notion.

If anything, I think Jesus' followers would've gone into damage control mode as a result of the crucifixion. They wouldn't have invented the idea. At worst, the idea that Jesus' died for sins was an invention meant to redeem Jesus' death on the cross. And the resurrection was invented to maintain the notion that Jesus was the christ in the face of his death.

In my opinion, the crucifixion of Jesus is about as certain as any historical event could be without having video footage. I have a hard time taking anybody seriously who denies it.

And that entails that Jesus existed, which is why I also have a hard time taking anybody seriously who denies the existence of Jesus.

Creating life

2010-05-21T10:23:00.003-04:00

I read an article this morning on the BBC called "'Artificial life' breakthrough announced by scientists". Basically, they put a DNA molecule together by copying the DNA of a known bacteria, then put the DNA in the cell of an already existing bacteria. And it worked.

Personally, I think that is really cool. I mean think of the possibilities if we could build DNA ourselves. The reason humans have five fingers, birds have wings, and snakes lack legs is because of their DNA. If we really understood how DNA is able to code for all these features, and if we're able to build DNA molecules, then the possibilities seem limitless. We could create all sorts of things that barely even resemble what already exists. We could recreate dinosaurs. We could make horses with wings. We could make super-humans.

Of course there'll be an ethical debate about how we should use this technology. If they won't even allow human cloning, there's no way anybody is going to allow hybrid pseudo-humanoids. I'm just saying we could.

I think that with this technology, there is potential for great danger and great good. We've already seen what can happen when software engineering capability falls into the hands of the wrong people. Some people can't resist the urge to create computer viruses and spread them to as many people as possible. It's only a matter of time before some nut creates a super virus or a super bacteria that will reek all kinds of havoc. Biological warfare will spare no one.

But at the same time, it seems at least possible to create organisms that fight cancer or other diseases. Maybe a person's own stem cells can be taken out, re-engineered, and inserted back into the person that would allow the person to live longer. I really can't tell you what the possibilities might be, but I suspect there are all kinds of good possibilities.

So is it worth it? Is the potential good worth pursuing given the potential harm? To an extent, I'm not sure it matters, because we have such a thirst for knowledge--such a curiosity--that this is going to be explored regardless of the dangers. If government ever tried to put a stop to it, somebody in a secret lab somewhere would do it anyway. But I think at the very least, people ought to be made aware of the potential dangers.

Somebody posted a question this morning on Yahoo Answers wanting people's thoughts. One nut on there thought it somehow proved that life could've emerged through purely naturalistic causes. How he figured that the ability of an intelligent being (namely, humans) to engineer life is somehow evidence against Intelligent Design is beyond me. It sounds to me like the very definition of Intelligent Design. I wonder if the nut on Yahoo Answers thinks that since we've shown that humans are able to engineer cars, that cars could have emerged through purely naturalistic causes.

And that raises an interesting question. Suppose we decide to create, from scratch, a few different living organisms and implant them on a planet somewhere far away from earth. And then suppose those creatures evolved to the point that they could ask such questions as, "Where did we come from?" "Why are we here?" And suppose they discovered the theory of evolution. And suppose a small number of them said, "Wait a minute. Our DNA shows evidence of intelligent design. We think life was engineered by an intelligent being." They would be right, wouldn't they?

Think about that for a minute. Their evidence for intelligent design would be no different than our evidence for intelligent design. And they would be right to draw that conclusion. Is it unreasonable, then, for us to draw that conclusion?

But most people say our DNA does not show evidence of intelligent design. Think about that, too. It means that if we engineered life, put it on another planet, and it evolved into smart critters like us, they would never be able to tell their they had been engineered. They would never be able to tell that their DNA was the result of intelligent design. In spite of the fact that their DNA was the result of intelligent design, there would be no evidence for it. And the most justified conclusion for them would be that they emerged through a blind natural process.

Catholic Answers

2010-05-06T20:40:00.002-04:00

I signed up at the Catholic Answers forum a long time ago so I could participate in the discussion forums, and I've been getting emails ever since. I just want you to see the subject line of the one I got today so you can tell me what you think.

Invest in Catholic Answers Live--The Dividends are Eternal

Is it just me or does that come across sounding a lot like something Johann Tetzel was doing back in the 16th century? Of course endulgences didn't have eternal consequences since purgatory wasn't eternal, but it does sound similar, doesn't it?

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not accusing Catholic Answers of anything. I'm sure what they mean is that if you send them money, you will be contributing to a ministry that is trying to bring people to salvation in Christ. I don't think they are saying that if you send them money, you'll be better off in eternity. But you have to admit it sure comes across that way, doesn't it?

Fine tuning and many worlds

2010-05-04T18:10:00.002-04:00

Today, I have a question for you. I posted this question on Yahoo Answers, but nobody answered it, so now it's your turn.

According to the fine tuning argument, there are a whole bunch of constants that have to have very precise values before life could exist in the universe. Some examples of these constants include the gravitational constant, the strong nuclear force, the charge of an electron, etc. There are about 26 of them, and some of them are ratios between the values of other ones. If any one of these constants were different by a smidgen, then life would not be possible. Since we live in a life-permitting universe, and since it's unimaginably unlikely that the universe would be life-permitting, it appears that the universe was rigged. Somebody intentionally tuned the values of these constants with the intention of making the universe habitable to living things.

There are a number of ways to respond to this argument. You could say the physical constants are not contingent at all, and that they could not have had any different values. There's a necessity about them. Who knows? If they could not have been otherwise, then they're not really "tuned" at all.

Or you could say we got lucky. The fine tuning argument only renders it improbable that the universe would be life-permitting. It doesn't render it impossible. Crazy things happen.

Or you could say that any sort of universe is equally improbable, but that doesn't make it at all remarkable that it would turn out some particular way. If there hadn't been life, there would've been something else that would've been unique to that universe. There's nothing special about life that makes our universe remarkable. Choosing life as the object toward which the universe was "finely tuned" is arbitrary since any combination of values for the constants would've yielded something unique. Personally, I think this is the strongest argument against the design argument from fine-tuning.

Or, you could say that if the universe had not been life-permitting, then we wouldn't be here to be thinking about it. I've heard this one a lot, but this seems to be about the worst response to the fine tuning argument. I think the firing squad analogy adequately reveals the weakness in this type of response.

But I didn't want to talk about any of these responses today. I wanted to talk about the "many worlds" or the "multiverse" response. In this response, it is granted that the constants of the universe are contingent. They could have been otherwise. And, in fact, they are otherwise in many different universe. According to this view, there may be a gazillion different universes. The more universes there are, the more likely it is that at least one of them would have the right combination of constants to be life-permitting. We just happen to live in one that is. And, in fact, every thinking thing that considers the fine tuning argument lives in such a universe.

Lemme use an analogy. Let's suppose only one person bought a lottery ticket. And let's suppose they won the lottery. If that happened, we might all be justified in thinking the game had been rigged. Somebody intentionally tweaked the balls so they would produce the same numbers that were on the ticket. But if millions of people each got a lottery ticket, it would not be remarkable at all that at least one of them would have the right numbers. And the more lottery tickets there are, the more likely it is that somebody would win.

So it is with universes. No matter how unlikely a life-permitting universe is, the more universes there are, the more likely it is that one would come along that had just the right combination of constants. That's right. The unlikely may be likely, depending on your background information.

(That reminds me of the debate about miracles, and how some people think miracles are unlikely because they're so rare and statistically improbable, and how some people respond by saying that even statistically unlikely events may be likely in light of further background information. It would be ironic if somebody thought it was absurd to suggest that anything unlikely could be likely (like the resurrection) while at the same time subscribing to the many universes idea.)

One might respond by saying there's no evidence for universes other than ours, and the explanation is ad hoc. But here, I don't think it's clear where the burden of proof lies. Both sides are positing an entity or entities to explain how it is that the universe is finely tuned for life. One side posits a designer. The other posits multiple universes. If fine-tuning alone isn't enough to justify belief in either a designer or multiple universes, and if we have to look elsewhere for verification that such entities exist, then both theories fail. Why should we presume one explanation until the other gets further verification? Why does one side have a burden of proof the other side doesn't have?

That's not really where I wanted to go, though. I'm going to get to my question now. Both sides agree about one thing--that the constants of the universe are contingent. They could've been otherwise. This question is mainly for the many worlds people. If it's true that the constants can vary in value from one universe to the next, and there's no necessity about them having any particular value, why is it that they don't vary within universes? Why, for example, don't we find some electrons in our universe that have different charges than other universes? Why isn't the force of gravity stronger with some masses than with other masses? Why is there such uniformity in our universe when it seems like there could've been diversity? Is it just an incredible coincidence that every particle of the same kind is exactly like every other particle of the same kind all over the universe, or is there a physical cause for it?

Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

2010-04-29T18:05:00.003-04:00

I recently read Naturalism Defeated?: Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. In the beginning, Alvin Plantinga briefly explains his evolutionary argument against naturalism. Then there are a collection of essays criticizing his argument. The essays weren't necessarily addressing Plantinga's explanation found at the beginning of the book, but to other presentations Plantinga has published in books and articles on the argument. Then at the end, he responds to the essays. This was a really interesting book on epistemology, but I have to admit that I didn't understand it all. I want to talk about it anyway.

First, lemme give a brief explanation of the argument (or at least my understanding of the argument). First, I'll start with a couple of definitions:

1. Naturalism--the view that the physical cosmos is all there is. There are no ghosts, gods, or supernatural beings.

2. Evolution--the view that life (particularly human life for the purposes of this argument) developed through a process of unguided mutation and natural selection.

Plantinga thinks that if both naturalism and evolution are true, then probability that our belief-producing cognitive faculties are reliable is low or inscrutable. Or, in philoso-geek-speak:

P(R/N&E) is low or inscrutible,

where P stands for probability, R stands for the reliability of our belief-producing cognitive faculties, N stands for naturalism, and E stands for evolution.

Plantinga further thinks that, as a consequence, anybody who believes in both naturalism and evolution has a defeater for their belief in the reliability of their belief-producing cognitive faculties. And, if they can't trust their belief-producing cognitive faculties, then they can't be rational in holding to naturalism, evolution, or anything else that is the result of their belief-producing cognitive faculties. So, believing in both naturalism and evolution is self-refuting.

Plantinga further argues that this defeater of the reliability of their cognitive faculties cannot be defeated because the only way to defeat it is to rely on one's cognitive faculties to do so.

Now I want to explain why Plantinga thinks P(R/N&E) is low or inscrutable. If there were a God (i.e. if naturalism were false), but we evolved through purely natural cause and effect, then it's still possible for our belief-producing cognitive faculties to be reliable. After all, it's possible that the origin of life was like a cue ball that when hit causes all the other balls to go exactly where the pool player intends them to go through perfectly natural cause and effect. He doesn't have to intervene anymore after hitting the cue ball. Perhaps God got things going, but then things evolved in such a way that our cognitive faculties are reliable. If so, then we could trust our cognitive faculties because God would guarantee them. So naturalism is necessary to make Plantinga's argument work. Evolution alone won't do it.

But naturalism alone won't do it either. If our cognitive faculties came about through some unknown process, maybe the process would guarantee their reliability somehow even though there was no God to have a purpose in any of it. So it's the combination of naturalism and evolution that Plantinga thinks renders our cognitive faculties unreliable.

Now, given naturalism, lemme explain why he thinks evolution is not likely to produce reliable cognitive faculties. It's because natural selection chooses adaptive behavior. It only cares about our cognitive faculties insofar as our cognitive faculties have some causal influence over our behavior.

And there are different views about that among naturalists. One view is called epiphenominalism. That's the view that all of our mental states are caused by our brains, but that the causation does not go the other way around. Our mental states (e.g. our beliefs and desires) cannot cause anything in our brain. Now, if that view is true, then obviously our minds have no causal influence over our behavior. It's easy to see why, in that case, P(R/N&E) would be low or inscrutable. Since our behavior would have nothing to do with our cognitive faculties, and natural selection only cares out about behavior, then natural selection would not care about our cognitive faculties. Our cognitive faculties would be irrelevant to whether we were naturally selected or not.

In another view (don't know the name), it is possible for our minds to have causal influence over our brains. But there are two sub-views under this view. One is that our minds have causal influence over our brains because of their syntax, and the other because of their semantics. By "syntax," I mean the structure of the brain that produced the mental event or that is associated with the mental event. By "semantics," I mean the actual content of the mental event--the actual belief or desire--or the "aboutness" of the mental event.

Let me see if I can explain that a little better. The difference is like the difference in whether a book has causal influence because of the physical properties of the ink and paper or whether it has causal influence because of the meaning of the words in the book.

Now if it turns out that our minds only have syntactical influence over the brain, but not semantical, then again, it's easy to see why this would make P(R/N&E) low or inscrutable. Natural selection would only care about the physical structure of the brain associated with a mental event because that is what results in behavior. It wouldn't care about the content of the mental event. If the physical structure of the brain is all that matters, then it wouldn't matter whether your beliefs were true or false.

Only if our minds have causal influence over our brains by virtue of semantics will natural selection care about our beliefs and our desires.

By the way, I'm using "care" anthropomorphically. Don't read too much into that.

So it's this last view that has any hope of giving us reliable cognitive faculties--cognitive faculties that will produce mostly true beliefs rather than false beliefs. But the only way for evolution to produce reliable cognitive faculties is if it turns out that true beliefs are more likely to result in adaptive behavior than false beliefs. If false beliefs are just as likely to result in adaptive behavior as true beliefs, then it would be easy to see how evolution would produce unreliable cognitive faculties.

Plantinga argues that it's easy to come up with combinations of false beliefs and desires that would result in adaptive behavior. They can be silly, too, because all we're interested in is getting our body parts to the right place to ensure our survival and reproductivity. Suppose, for example, that a tiger is chasing you. You believe tigers are harmless, cuddly, fun animals who love to play chase, and such is your desire to play with said tiger that you run from it. Although the belief is false, it gets your body parts where they need to be to stay alive. Or let's take something even more silly. Let's say you believe the tiger is sweet, you want to hug it, and you believe the best way to hug it is to run from it. It's an absurd belief, but it gets you where you need to go to stay alive. And it's not hard to come up with scenarios like this. For any situation a person can bring up in which they might claim that some true belief resulted in adaptive behavior, you can come up with an absurd belief that would have the same result. So, argues, Plantinga, evolution is not likely to produce reliable cognitive faculties.

The most common objection that I half way understood was that although given evolution and natural selection alone, our cognitive faculties might be unreliable, it could be there are other factors which, when combined with naturalism and evolution, would increase the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable. In other words...

P(R/N&E) may be low or inscrutable, but P(R/N&E&C) might be high.

I don't remember what suggestions were given for C, but I remember some of the critics pointing out that we have an intuition about the reliability of our cognitive faculties that overcomes any argument to the contrary. There's a kind of Descartian clearness and distinctness about our cognitive faculties.

Plantinga didn't respond to that the way I expected him to. What I would've said was that, yeah, sure. I totally agree that our cognitive faculties are reliable. That's not my point. My point is that if our cognitive faculties were the result of naturalistic evolution, then they would not be reliable. Since they are reliable, then either naturalism is false, evolution is false, or they're both false. Here's the syllogism:

1. If N&E are true, then our cognitive faculties are unreliable.
2. Our cognitive faculties are not unreliable.
3. Therefore, either N is false, E is false, or they're both false.

But that's not how Plantinga responded. I'd tell you how he responded, but I don't remember.

Another objection I remember was that although it's easy to come up with individual cases of where a false belief might produce adaptive behavior, it doesn't follow that our beliefs could be systematically false and still result in adaptive behavior. Now this, I kind of agreed with. One of the problems I had with Plantinga's argument before I read this book is that it just seemed likely to me that, as a whole, true beliefs are more likely to produce adaptive behavior than false beliefs, even if it turns out that in some cases, false beliefs might produce adaptive behavior. Because cognitive faculties don't just produce individual beliefs. They produce kinds of beliefs.

In the past, Plantinga has responded to this kind of argument by giving an example of how a systematically false kind of belief can still result in adaptive behavior. For example, suppose you believed that everything was a witch, including inanimate objects. Your cat is a witch, your car is a witch, etc. You might believe that witch hamburger is tasty or that witch girl is a cutie and none of these beliefs would result in behavior that was any different than if you didn't have these beliefs. So almost all of your beliefs would be false, but they would still result in adaptive behavior.

One of the critics pointed out that all of these false beliefs can be broken down into true and false beliefs. For example, "That witch hamburger is tasty," can be broken down into, "That object is a witch," and "That object is a kind of hamburger," and "That object tastes good." So you've got two true beliefs and one false belief.

I want to stray away from this book a little now and share a thought I've had for a while since I first heard Plantinga's argument. I've noticed that in a lot of debates between theists and atheists over morality that atheists will explain our morality by appealing to evolution, or at least social evolution. Moral beliefs produce adaptive behavior. That's why we developed into moral creatures. There's no reason to suppose there's any divine law behind these moral instincts.

Think about that. Atheists who argue this way aren't saying that objective moral values emerged through evolution. Quite the opposite. They are denying the existence of objective moral values on the basis that our moral beliefs are the result of evolution. Essentially, they are conceding one of Plantinga's primary arguments--that if our belief-producing cognitive faculties are the result of evolution, then we cannot trust their reliability. It's because evolution produced our belief in morality that somehow calls their reliability into question. But if that's the case, then why stop at morality?

Which is more likely--that evolution would result in reliable belief-producing cognitive faculties or that it would result in unreliable belief-producing cognitive faculties? If reliable, then shouldn't we all embrace the existence objective moral values since that seems to be our most natural inclination? But if unreliable, then why not admit that our belief in naturalism and evolution are both irrational? In fact all of our beliefs are irrational?

But that brings me back to the book and a thought I had while reading it. This is another objection I had to Plantinga's argument. If it turns out that a person who believes in both naturalism and evolution is rationally obliged to believe that the reliability of their belief-producing cognitive faculties is low or inscrutable, then shouldn't they doubt that conclusion? It seems like if Plantinga's argument is sound, then a person could never rationally come to the conclusion that they are irrational because it would require them to reason rationally. How could they trust that naturalism and evolution are incompatible with the reliability of their cognitive faculties if their cognitive faculties are being called into question? Do you know what I'm saying?

Near the end of the book, I was happy to find that Plantinga noticed this problem, too, and he addressed it. He didn't really solve the problem so far as I could tell (or that I can remember). He just discussed it. It leads to an infinite loop.

That's about all I have to say. My apologies to Alvin Plantinga and all the essay writers for that book if I've butchered any of your views. I fully admit that I didn't understand everything I read. But it was really interesting! And I will probably read it again at some point.

To evolve or not to evolve

2010-04-14T18:27:00.002-04:00

When I first started this blog, the purpose was to be able to post thoughts that I had but hadn't necessarily given a lot of thought to just to get feedback. That way, I could refine my thoughts. But as I began to accumulate readers, I became reluctant to post just any ole thought I had. I kind of felt obliged to be right, and to put forth some effort to make sure I was right before I posted it. I got to where I didn't want to post anything unless I was prepared to defend it. But I didn't like that feeling because it defeated the purpose for which I started this blog. I didn't start this blog to evangelize or to convince other people of my point of view, but as time went on, that's what I ended up doing.

Well, today, I want to post a random thought I had while driving home from work one day.

Supposedly, we're all the result of natural selection acting on random mutations. But as people become more compassionate, and technology improves (especially medical technology), natural selection is sort of disabled. That's one of the criticism Friedrich Nietzsche had about Christianity. Because Christian morality is concerned with the weak, it allows the weak to prosper instead of being weeded out. And that, in turn, prevents the rise of the over-man--the next step in human evolution. We are unable to evolve as a species because we are helping the weak survive and reproduce. I don't think Nietzsche was the only person to recognize the problem. That's why the Nazi's were trying to exterminate Jews, gays, and everybody they thought were inferior. It was a way of helping natural selection do its job. It was more like unnatural selection, but it did what the Nazis thought natural selection was SUPPOSED to be doing, but was being kept from doing by Christian morality. And here in America, we had eugenics. At least we weren't trying to kill people. We were just sterilizing them to prevent them from reproducing. I know the Nazi's were influenced by Nietzsche. I don't know whether the Americans were.

Compassion won out, though. The good guys won the war, and eugenics was outlawed. So, for several decades, we have done everything we can to prevent mankind from evolving. And the better our medicinal capabilities become, the more stagnant our evolution will be. In fact, I'd say we've pretty much stopped it altogether. We're as far as we can get because we keep the sick and the weak alive, and they breed.

But I think that could change with this whole genome thing. I read an article recently that was talking about how it becomes cheaper and cheaper to sequence a human genome. I think the first time they did it, it cost something like $50,000. I don't remember what it was. But now, it can be done for something like $5000. And it's going to continue to get cheaper. And we're going to understand the genome much better in the future.

So this is what I think might happen. Sequencing the genome will become so cheap and so useful that pretty much everybody will have their own genome sequenced. It will allow them to anticipate sickness and disease, which in turn will allow them to prevent it. But there's another practical use in sequencing a person's genome. If everybody is doing it, then everybody is going to have a record. And with everybody having a record of the genome, it's just a matter of time that people are going to want to know what kind of genes their significant other has before they get married. After all, if they're going to have children, they're going to want the best. And since you might be a little more reluctant to have children with somebody who has inferior genes, or to have children if your genes are inferior, people with better genes might end up procreating more than people with inferior genes do. And people with inferior genes may find it more difficult to get married than people with good genes. If that happens, it can act as natural selection. People with inferior genes will be attenuated in the gene pool.

On the other hand, we don't need our genes necessarily to make it more difficult for us to reproduce. There are plenty of other factors you might look at that are more obvious. There are pretty people, ugly people, smart people, stupid people, confident people, shy people, healthy people, unhealthy people, lazy people, and industrious people. Nobody is being weeded out of the gene pool because ugly people can find other ugly people, stupid people can find other stupid people, etc. If everybody's genome is sequenced, then people with inferior genes will find other people with inferior genes. Nobody is going to be weeded out.

I don't know why shyness doesn't get weeded out of the gene pool. Shy people and confident people are like cat people and dog people. Dog people can go to the park with their dog and meet other dog people. Cat people can't do that. So it's easier for dog people to connect than it is for cat people to connect. In the same way, it's easier for confident people to connect than it is for shy people to connect. So you'd think shyness would get weeded out of the gene pool.

Of course shyness isn't necessarily the result of genes. To an extent, it can be the result of your environment. It's both, although with some people it has more to do with their genes and with other people it has more to do with their environment. But at least genetic shyness ought to be weeded out.

Another thing to think about is the fact that everybody has good traits and bad traits. A person may be ugly but make up for it with a charismatic personality. A person may be shy but make up for it by being a genius. Inferior traits ride piggy bag on superior traits. Since a person with inferior traits may be sought after because of their superior traits, those inferior traits will stay in the gene pool.

resurrection and evolution: the irony

2010-04-03T15:18:00.003-04:00

Resurrection

Jim: Resurrections are highly improbable events, so it's highly unlikely that Jesus was raised from the dead.

Bob: As for the probabilities of Jesus rising from the dead, yes its highly improbable--however we know that highly improbable things do happen. What are the statistical odds that you and I would be carrying on this conversation right now? What are the odds of someone being struck by lightning twice at different times in their life? What are the odds of someone winning the powerball lottery? All of these are statistically "off the chart" yet they happen.

Evolution

Bob: It is highly improbable that life would evolve naturally, so it is unlikely that humans evolved.

Jim: As for the probabilities of live evolving naturally, yes its highly improbable--however we know that highly improbable things do happen. What are the statistical odds that you and I would be carrying on this conversation right now? What are the odds of someone being struck by lightning twice at different times in their life? What are the odds of someone winning the powerball lottery? All of these are statistically "off the chart" yet they happen.

Does anybody else see the irony? I suspect some people reading this may think I'm just making it up, but I can assure you I'm not. Jim's argument against resurrections comes up all the time, and usually David Hume is invoked. Bob's answer comes up all the time, too. Here's one example.

Bob's argument against evolution comes up all the time, too, in discussions of intelligent design, the origin of life, and the fine tuning of the universe to permit life. Jim's answer came up on a blog I saw just today (which is what prompted this post). In fact, I quoted it verbatim, which you can read in the comments here.

ID/creation vs. evolution

2010-03-18T22:47:00.003-04:00

Once again, I'm dipping my toe in an area I ought not due to lack of education. I just wanted to respond to an argument I've heard frequently when this subject comes up.

Critics of intelligent design or creationism will often say that IDers or creationists only offer arguments against evolution. They do not provide any positive evidence for their own point of view. The critics will then say that even if evolution were false, that would not make intelligent design or creationism true.

Whether IDers/creationists do provide positive evidence for their own point of view isn't my concern right now. I just want to respond to that last statement--that disproving evolution does not prove ID or evolution.

It seems to me that there's only two possibilities--either life was engineered somehow, or life arose through purely naturalistic means with no purpose behind it. I don't see how there could be any other possibility.

If life was engineered, then some sort of intelligent design is true.

If life came about through natural unguided processes, then it either came about gradually or all of a sudden. Now I don't think anybody is going to argue that a fully formed biological entity like a cat or a human just came together naturally all of a sudden with all of its parts in place. So if cats and humans emerged through a natural process, then it happened gradually.

Maybe it is due to lack of imagination on my part, but assuming life came about gradually through a natural process, the mechanisms of evolution (mutation and natural selection) are pretty much the only game in town. So one could make the following disjunctive syllogism:

1. Either ID/creation is true, or evolution is true.
2. Evolution is not true.
3. Therefore, ID/creation is true.

If ID/creation and evolution are the only possibilities, then any argument against one is an argument for the other. The only way to escape the argument is to come up with some third possibility. If there were a third possibility, then an argument against one view would not necessarily be an argument for another view since there would be two other possibilities.

But let's suppose there is some third possibility. As I argued above, the third possibility would have to be a natural process because either life was engineered or it wasn't. That's just the law of excluded middle. So we can form this argument:

1. Either ID, evolution, or X.
2. Not evolution.
3. Therefore, either ID or X.

So an argument against evolution wouldn't necessarily be an argument for ID since X might be true instead. But it would narrow the scope, and a person could make this argument:

1. Either ID or X
2. Not X
3. Therefore, ID.

Depending on what X is, a person could still work his way around to an argument for ID. Disproving evolution would just be the first step.

But before somebody offers an X in order to disprove the ID/creation vs. evolution disjunct, he's first got to make sure that X is a viable option. I mean if it turns out that X is less likely than ID/creation, then an argument against evolution is still going to work as an argument for ID/creation. In light of arguments against evolution, X will weaken the case for ID/creation in proportion to the probability of X. If ID is far more likely than X, then an argument against evolution makes ID far more likely. If X is just as likely as ID, then an argument against evolution makes ID and X equal alternative candidates. If X is more likely than ID, then an argument against evolution makes X more likely to be true.

You don't have to subscribe to ID, creationism, evolution, or X to make the point I'm making. I'd make this same point regardless of which I thought was true. It seems pretty obvious to me.

Emotivist objection to arguments for morality

2010-03-17T09:03:00.001-04:00

Emotivism is the view that moral statements are subjective statements about a person's own attitudes toward behaviors. "Murder is wrong," is just another way of saying, "I hate murder."

One way moral objectivists try to persuade others of their point of view is by conjuring up the most heinous scenarios they can think of in hopes that the other person's moral intuitions will rise to the surface and they will realize that they already believe in objective morality. For example, they'll say things like, "If there are no objective moral values, then there's nothing really wrong with mother stabbing and father raping. It's just a matter of personal preference or social convention." Few people are willing to bite the bullet and say there's nothing really wrong with mother stabbing and father raping, so they are expected to admit that there really are objective morals. That is a tactic Greg Koukl advocates in Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air.

Some people object to this tactic on the basis that it makes a false appeal to emotions. All it does is manipulate people by stirring up their emotions. It doesn't follow that because you have very negative feelings about something that it's therefore wrong. So it's unfair to use people's emotions, bypassing their rationality, in order to convince them of objective morality. My friend, Angie, made a similar point in Conversations with Angie after reading Relativism.

When I reflect about my own moral intuitions and the emotions that are sometimes associated with them, it seems obvious to me that they are not the same thing. It could be that my emotions are causing me to think things are right or wrong, or it could be that my sense of right and wrong is causing me to be emotional about something, but my emotions and my moral intuitions seem obviously distinct.

For one thing, emotions do not have propositional content, but moral imperatives do. My sense that "People should not be mean to each other," is different than the emotion I feel when people are mean to each other. I don't just feel bad about certain actions. I think they're wrong. There's a difference.

It's not perfectly clear to me which is the cause and which is the effect, though. I can imagine that even if I didn't think something was wrong, I might still get emotional about it. I may think there's nothing wrong with being mean to people, but still not want people to do it just because I care about people. If so, then I'd get emotional about it even if I didn't think it was wrong. On the other hand, I may have an intellectual conviction that it's wrong for people to be mean to each other, but not really care whether they are because I don't care about people.

Greg Koukl thinks people already know certain things are wrong, but maybe they don't realize it because they haven't thought about it or been confronted with it. Getting their emotions riled up is a way of getting them to notice their moral intuitions. So in his view, your emotions don't cause you to think things are wrong. They just make you notice that you already think they are wrong.
They awaken your moral intuitions. Thinking that something wrong is what causes you to get emotional about it.

There are two more reasons I have a problem with emotivism--equating our emotions with our moral intuitions. First, if they were the same thing, then there should be a correlation between the strength of the emotion and the gravity of the sin. The stronger you felt about something, the more wrong you would think it was, and vice versa. But that is clearly not the case. You would probably feel far more anger and hurt if somebody murdered your own child than you would if you read about some child being murdered in some other country who you've never met. But you would think both murders were equally wrong.

Second, it's possible to think something is wrong and not be emotional about it. And, it's possible to be emotional about something and not think it's wrong. A person on death row may feel quite a bit of anger and sorrow about his fate, and yet not think anything wrong was being done to him. In fact, he may feel resentment and still think he is getting what he deserves. A person may think premarital sex is wrong, but feel really good about it and even be happy for people who are engaging in it. And if somebody's immoral activity benefits us in some way, we may think the other person did something wrong but still be quite thankful that they did it.

What's wrong with replacement theology?

2010-03-15T19:18:00.000-04:00

I don't know if "replacement theology" is a technical term or if it's just a term of derision. I've only heard it used by people who don't approve of it. I've heard people describe replacement theology who seem to agree with it, but they don't call it "replacement theology." I don't know what they call it. I'm not very well read on covenant theology and all those different theological options.

Anywho, I tend to lean toward replacement theology as I understand it. I'm not going to explain why in this blog. I just wanted to share a thought I had the other day.

Let's suppose, hypothetically, that a whole mass of gentiles all converted to Judaism. And then all the people who were Jews before came to believe that Jesus was the messiah, in which case, they're not Jews anymore. (Just about every Jew I've talked to has told me that when a Jew believes in Jesus, they are no longer a Jew.) Now the only Jews are people who were gentiles before. Wouldn't that be a kind of replacement?

Can there really be alternate realities?

2010-03-15T19:13:00.000-04:00

I think "alternate realities" is a contradiction in terms because if there are two different realities, and they are both real, well then there's not two realities. There's just one reality that has two parts. If there really were two different realities, then one of them is not real because if they're both real, then there's just one reality.

Why we talk past each other

2010-03-11T22:03:00.002-05:00

I've noticed a bad habit that it seems nobody is immune to, and I think it explains why we talk past each other. We all have standard ways of responding to particular arguments, and we become so used to responding in a particular way that it becomes automatic. But every now and then, somebody will make an argument that is similar to the one we've got an automatic answer to. Since we've heard the argument a million times before, we don't notice the subtle difference in what is being presented to us. We don't listen carefully. We just give our pat answer. And then the other person gets frustrated because our answer doesn't really deal with the argument they gave.

I think that is probably why atheists so often misrepresent the moral argument. That is something that has baffled me for quite some time because in a lot of debates I've seen, the Christians are always very careful to nip the common misunderstanding in the bud, but they are never successful. Their atheist opponent still misconstrues the argument when they respond to it. And even when they are corrected, they continue to misconstrue it the next time they have a debate with a Christian who brings up the same argument.

I guess there probably are a lot of Christians who have said atheists can't be moral, so whenever an atheist hears anything like the moral argument for God, their knee-jerk reaction is to respond to the accusation that atheists can't be moral. They don't notice that no such accusation is made in the moral argument because when Christians argue that there can be no objective morals if there is no god, it sounds similar enough to the accusation that atheists have heard before.

That's just one example. I see it happen all the time. I'm not just saying atheists do this, either. Like I said, this is a problem I've noticed that nobody is immune to. I've heard Christian talk show hosts do it when people call in. It makes me wonder how many times I've done it. I do generally try to listen carefully to what somebody is saying before I respond to them, but that can be tedious.

Sometimes I feel a little anxious whenever I present an argument to somebody. I feel like I've got to spell the argument out as fast as I can before I'm interrupted with a response based on a misunderstanding. That's why I prefer written dialogue to spoken dialogue. Solomon said, "He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame to him" (Proverbs 18:13). Let's try to avoid the folly, shall we? Maybe we can have productive conversations if we just try a little harder to make sure we understand each other before we respond. And if we're just feeling too lazy to make sure we understand, maybe we shouldn't bother to respond.

lightsaber fight

2009-10-16T17:31:00.001-04:00

I don't remember if I showed this to y'all or not. About a year ago, I downloaded a free rotoscoping software called lsmaker that allows you to put lightsabers in your videos. The program doesn't have a lot of flexibility, but it's free, and you can actually add lightsabers more quickly than in ordinary rotoscoping software.

I captured some sounds effects on the internet and used Audacity (which is also free) to edit them for the video. Then I used Windows Movie Maker to put it all together. It took me about 4.5 hours to do 30 seconds of video. After I did this, I had an all new respect for people who did Star Wars.

The is my niece and nephew, Julia and Jake, fighting in my sister's back yard.

Can historians prove that Jesus was raised from the dead?

2009-10-10T13:24:00.002-04:00

Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman debated this issue, and it's posted on youtube in four parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Ehrman was careful in his first speech to say that the debate was not over whether the resurrection happened, but over whether we can use historical methods to demonstrate that it happened. His argument was basically that since God is necessary to make a resurrection happen, and God is not accessible by historical methods, then the resurrection cannot be demonstrated by history. He also gave a Humean argument against miracles based on probability.

I think Ehrman is very confused about how probability works. Bill Craig pointed that out to him in a debate once, but I don't think Ehrman understood what Craig was explaining, because he accused Craig of trying to make a mathematical proof of the resurrection. I don't think Licona did a good job of addressing Ehrman's confusion.

Ehrman also made a number of irrelevant points. He pointed to the many discrepancies between the gospels in order to demonstrate that they are unreliable in order to demonstrate that we have poor evidence for the resurrection. But as Licona demonstrated, using quotes from Ehrman himself, none of these discrepancies prevented Ehrman and the vast majority of scholars from concluding that Jesus was crucified and that the disciples had experiences they understood as being appearances of the risen Jesus. Since Licona was arguing from three premises that Ehrman already agreed with, Ehrman's discussion of Bible contradictions was completely irrelevant.

Licona based his whole argument on three facts:

1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. Jesus appeared to the apostles.
3. Jesus appeared to Paul.

He argued that the resurrection hypothesis was a better explanation of these facts than rival hypotheses because it better fulfilled four historical criteria--explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and the least ad hoc.

Licona defined an ad hoc explanation as an explanation that requires positing entities for which there is no independent evidence. But then later, Licona posited God as a necessary condition for the resurrection without giving any independent evidence for God. I thought this was a severe blunder on Licona's part.

Ehrman claimed that Licona's first point--that Jesus died by crucifixion--was irrelevant to the case for the resurrection since if Jesus had died by stoning, the structure of the argument would've been the same. And since the second and third points are really the same point--that Jesus appeared to people after his death--that Licona really only had one point to argue from. I don't know if I'm confused or if Ehrman is confused. I mean sure, it doesn't matter how Jesus died, but obviously that Jesus died is extremely relevant to the resurrection. A person can't be raised from the dead if they haven't first died. The fact that Jesus die by crucifixion, of course, entails that Jesus died, so Licona does not just have one point. He's got two. I thought Licona should've pointed out the nonsense behind Ehrman's argument, but he just ignored it.

While demonstrating the inadequacy of the hallucination hypothesis (which Erhman preferred to call the visionary hypothesis), Licona said hallucinations don't happen in groups. This is another area where I think Licona smuggled in some information without substantiating it. His whole intention in the debate was to show that you could infer the resurrection from historical facts that are already accepted by almost all new testament scholars. One of them was that Jesus appeared to the disciples. But the fact that the vast majority of scholars agree that Jesus appeared to his disciples does not mean they all agree Jesus appeared to them in groups. Licona just smuggled that one in, and Ehrman didn't seem to catch it.

Ehrman's response was to give counter examples. He pointed to the many episodes of the virgin, Mary, appearing to many people in groups. Licona didn't respond to that, which was disappointing. I wish there had been a cross examination period.

Ehrman claimed that the disciples only saw visions of Jesus, not Jesus himself. He brought up the incident where Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James, and John, and pointed out the fact that even though Moses and Elijah appeared to Peter, James, and John, it didn't cause them to believe they had been raised from the dead. That really surprised me because if Ehrman was claiming that the vision of Jesus after his death was the same kind of thing, then he's left without an explanation for why the appearance of Moses did not cause them to think Moses had risen from the dead but the vision of Jesus did cause them to believe that Jesus had been risen from the dead. It seems to me that we can reasonably infer that the appearance of Jesus was not the same as the appearance of Moses. And if the appearance of Moses was a mere vision, then the appearance of Jesus was not a mere vision.

Ehrman also asked how Paul recognized Jesus since Paul didn't know Jesus during his mortal lifetime. He seemed to think that somehow worked as an argument against Paul's appearance, but he didn't explain how. Licona didn't answer the question, and unfortunately, there was no cross examination period. I suppose Jesus introduced himself to Paul, and that's how Paul knew who it was. Granted, it's possible some supernatural being other than Jesus just felt like appearing to Paul and pretending to be Jesus so Paul would convert to Christianity, but it seems far more likely to me that it was Jesus himself.

I thought it was a good debate. Some points each brought up were not adequately addressed by the other side, but given the time constraints of debates, that's to be expected. I would say the debate was a tie, because I can't decide who won.

Jehovah's Witnesses misrepresent the Trinity

2009-10-08T17:49:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, some Jehovah's Witnesses came by and gave me the September 1, 2009 edition of the Watchtower magazine. On page 28, there's a short one page article called "In What Way are Jesus and his Father One?" I think this article illustrates very clearly why it is that Jehovah's Witness have such a difficult time understanding the Trinity and why they constantly misrepresent it.

At the beginning of the article, it says, "Some quote this text to prove that Jesus and his Father are two parts of a triune God." Then at the end of the article it says, "Thus, when Jesus said, 'I and the Father are one,' he was speaking, not of a mysterious Trinity, but of a wonderful unity--the closest bond possible between two persons." Everything that comes between the beginning and the end, then, was meant to demonstrate that the Trinitarian interpretation of John 10:30 is incorrect.

What is striking for this trinitarian is how the article attempts to prove its point. It says that Jesus' statements in verses 27 to 29 "would have made little sense to his listeners if he and his Father were one and the same person." After paraphrasing the verses, the articles says, "No one would conclude that this son and his father were the same person." Citing Matthew 24:36, the article asks rhetorically, "If Jesus and his Father were really one person, why did Jesus pray to God and humbly admit to not knowing things that only his Father knew?"

So basically this article attacks modalism as if it were the Trinity. The authors of this article are very confused, and they are confusing the many Jehovah's Witnesses who read it. According to modalism, the Father and the Son are the same person. But that is not the Trinity. In the Trinity, the Father and the Son are distinct persons. So a trinitarian would totally agree with this article when it says,

This strong bond of unity, however, does not make God and his Son, Jesus, indistinguishable from each other. They are two individuals. Each one has his own distinct personality. Jesus has his own feelings, thoughts, experiences, and free will. Nevertheless, he chose to submit his will to that of his Father.

The Jehovah's Witnesses who left this article said they would come back this Saturday for a chat. I was thinking about asking them if I could video tape the conversation. Wouldn't that be neat?

N.T. Wright's upcoming book on Paul

2009-10-05T22:15:00.003-04:00

N.T. Wright has been working on a series called Christian Origins and the Question of God. The first three books have already been published: The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, and The Resurrection of the Son of God. The next book in the series is supposed to be about Paul.

I've noticed that before he brings out another book in the series, he always publishes extensively on the subject first. I'm guessing the reason is to sort of submit his idea for peer review so that he can refine his views for his book. Well, he has taken a lot of heat for his views on Paul in recent years--especially over his understanding of justification--from people like John Piper and Daniel Wallace and others. So far, Wright has stuck to his guns, but his book on Paul still seems to be taking a long time. With all the criticism Wright has received, I figure one of two things are going to happen. Either he will change his views or else his book on Paul is bound to be one of his best.

I worry sometimes that he'll get old and die before he finishes. The first book was published in 1992, and he's still got two books to go. I've really enjoyed this series, and it would be a bummer if he died before he finished it.

I haven't even been reading his books on Paul. There's too much to read, and I figure I'll get the final version of his views in his upcoming book, and it will have his best arguments. So there's not much point in me spending a lot of time reading what he's writing now. There is one exception, though. I did read his book called What Saint Paul Really Said, but the only reason I read that one is because I thought it was a response to A.N. Wilson's view that Paul was the founder of Christianity. In reality, Wright's book only had one chapter on that.

Does anybody have any idea of when Wright's big book on Paul will finally come out?

Was Jesus a Myth?

2009-09-29T23:43:00.002-04:00

There was a debate recently between Dan Barker and James White on the question of whether the gospel writers borrowed from pagan myths, and Dr. White posted the debate on youtube:

Part 1

Part 2

I would like to have asked Dr. White if he believes Joseph Smith borrowed from View of the Hebrews to write the Book of Mormon, and if so, what he based that on. It would be interesting to see if the arguments he gave for a dependency on View of the Hebrews would be different or similar to arguments people like Dan Barker give for a dependency on pagan myths.

Apologetics conference videos available

2009-09-10T18:45:00.002-04:00

The videos for the "Faith & Reason" get together at Saddleback church that I mentioned a couple of blogs ago are now available here.

The one with J.P. Moreland on "Has Science Made Faith in God Obsolete?" is worth checking out.

The one with Norman Geisler on "If God Exists, Why Is There Evil?" is not worth checking out in my opinion.

The one by William Lane Craig on "How Did the Universe Begin" is pretty much a rehash of what he says every time the subject comes up, so not much new there unless you've never heard Bill Craig before, in which case you should check it out.

The one by Dinesh D'Souza on "How Do I Know God Exists?" was better than I expected since I had not been very impressed with him in the past, but the topic he discusses has more to do with answering the arguments of the "new atheists" than explaining how we can know God exists.

I only caught the tail end of Darrel Bock's talk on "What the Gospels Really Say About Jesus," so I can't say much about that.

Greg Koukl's talk on "How Can I Defend My Faith Without Sounding Defensive," did not do justice to his book on Tactics, which addresses the same subject in much more detail, although Greg does a good impersonation of Lt. Columbo. I really think everybody should read that book, whether they are Christians or not, because it's a great primer on critical thinking for beginners. It's very well written and easy to understand with great advice on how to have a productive and civil conversation with somebody you have strong disagreements with. I think this book has the potential to raise the quality of debate between Christians and non-Christians if both sides read the book.

Does Calvinism render apologetics superflous?

2009-09-08T18:00:00.000-04:00

A while back, Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason posted a video blog dealing with the issue of how to reconcile Calvinism with the use of tactics to defend Christianity. You see, in Calvinism, God determines from the beginning of time who will and who won't embrace the gospel. But that raises the question of why we should evangelize at all since presumably, if God intends somebody to be saved, then that person will get saved whether we witness to them or not.

A lot of Calvinists, I've noticed, have sort of adopted this view, too. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries sometimes corrects people he thinks are mistaken to think that they can persuade anybody to become a Christian by the power of their arguments since it is God who determines whether people will be saved or not. In answer to the question of why we should be engaged in apologetics, he says we should do it because we are commanded to in such passages as 2 Peter 3:15. I've also noticed that a lot of Calvinists make little or no effort to defend the faith with gentleness and respect since they don't think their delivery has any influence whatsoever on whether somebody else will convert or not. Only God can change the heart, so they say, and no argument of ours can have any persuasive power.

In the discussion section of Greg's blog, I mentioned that Jonathan Edwards had specifically addressed this issue in his book on The Freedom of the Will. Somebody asked me to summarize his arguments. Since I don't blog much anymore, I thought I'd cheat and just cut and paste what I wrote there. Here ye go...

Greg agrees with Edwards that not only is the final event (e.g. somebody being persuaded) ordained, but the means are also ordained. In the analogy of Abraham and Sara, not only would it have been ordained that Sara get pregnant, but it would also have been ordained that Abraham have sex with Sara. Abraham having sex with Sara is just as certain as Sara getting pregnant since God guarantees them both.

Edwards argues for the compatibalist view of freedom, which is the view that all of our actions are determined by our strongest motivation, desire, inclination, bias, or mental predisposition. God can guarantee human action because he has causal influence over the persons heart.

In the case of defending the gospel, I suppose one might argue that if God has already guaranteed the end result, then the means are superfluous. But the means are only superfluous if they have no hand in bringing about the end result. But just as it is plain to see that there is a causal connection between Abraham having sex with Sara and Sara getting pregnant, so also is there a causal connection between one person arguing for a point of view and the other person being persuaded by the arguments. The arguing itself is just as much determined by God as the other person's response to the arguments.

Unless there is a causal connection between means and ends, it would be superfluous for God to ever ordain means. But if God ordains means to accomplish ends, then those ends would fail to take place if the means also failed to take place. The reason God can guarantee ends, even though they are accomplished by means which could theoretically be removed, is because God guarantees the means as well as the ends.

If it happens that we live in a completely deterministic world, and if all ends were determined by the initial conditions of the universe when the universe began, that would still not render means superfluous. The reason is that the means themselves would be part of the causal chain. Remove one link in the causal chain, and you alter everything that comes after. So determinism does not render means superfluous either.

In libertarian free will, acts of the will are not determined by any antecedent causes and/or conditions--not even our motives, desires, or inclinations. Motives can influence acts, but they can't determine acts.

The stronger a desire is, the more difficult it is to resist. It is theoretically possible, then, for a desire to be so strong that it renders the person incapable of resisting. In that case, the person does not have libertarian free will. It follows that the weaker a desire is, the more freedom a person has in the libertarian sense. And a person can only have complete freedom if they are under no influence of desire whatsoever.

So contrary to arguing being pointless under the Calvinist view of God's sovereignty, arguing is actually more effective under the Calvinist view than the Arminian view. Under the Arminian view (libertarianism), there can only be a loose connection between means and ends, whereas under the Calvinist view (compatibalism), there is a necessary connection between means and ends.

Arguments can only work if they are effective in changing the opinion or heart of another person. But the more influence the argument has in persuading the other person, the less libertarian free will the other person has. It follows that if a person has perfect libertarian free will (i.e. if their choice is not so much as influenced by anything external) then arguments can have no persuasive power whatsoever.

But besides all this, we have a moral obligation to defend the gospel (1 Peter 3:15), and Solomon said that whatever you find to do, do it with all your might (Ecclesiastes 9:10). So we ought to make the best arguments we can, and excel at making our arguments with gentleness and respect, as Peter says.

Faith & Reason: Believe your beliefs and doubt your doubts

2009-09-05T19:03:00.001-04:00

There's going to be a get-together at Saddle Back Church with speakers such as Greg Koukl, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and others this Saturday, and there will be live streaming. Check it out.

Peter Singer on healthcare

2009-09-05T00:15:00.000-04:00

Peter Singer published an article in the New York Times recently on "Why We Must Ration Health Care. I'd like to get your thoughts on it. Even if you disagree, it is an interesting article. He attempts to put a dollar value on human life.

Review: The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins by Burton L. Mack

2009-08-17T18:39:00.002-04:00

I wrote this review back in 2002 and posted it on my web page. I decided to delete that web page since I don't use it anymore. I'm posting the review here just so I don't lose it. I suppose nobody is interested in this book anymore since it's so old, but since my review discusses the synoptic problem, it may be of interest to some people. Here ye go...

Not all scholars agree with Jesus’ Jewish roots. Some of them think Jesus started off as a kind of cynic-sage in the Greek tradition. They imagine that the earliest Christians were very syncretistic, borrowing freely from neighboring religions, especially the mystery cults. Burton Mack, for example, argues that, “The Jesus movement began as a home-grown variety of Cynicism in the rough and ready circumstance of Galilee before the war” (p. 120). In his reconstruction of the origins of Christianity, Jesus’ earliest followers did not think of Jesus as the Jewish messiah. They did not believe that Jesus died for sins or that he rose from the dead. Nor did they worship and honor him with hymns, prayers, and rituals (p. 4).

To arrive at his reconstruction of Christian origins, Mack begins with a particular solution to the synoptic problem. The synoptic problem is the problem of determining how Matthew, Mark, and Luke are related in terms of literary dependence. John’s gospel is different from the first three, but the first three gospels are so similar in their stories and even in their wording that they can be placed side by side and compared. (See Gospel Parallels.) Mack uses the most popular solution, which is the two-source hypothesis (2SH). In the 2SH, Mark was written first. Matthew and Luke both wrote their gospels using Mark as a source and then adding other material. In much of the additional material not found in Mark, Matthew and Luke still agree with one another, which has led scholars to think they shared a common source besides Mark. The hypothetical source they shared is designated Q, which comes from the German word quelle, meaning source. Mack takes Q quite seriously as a document in its own right and believes that, “Q is the best record we have for the first forty years of the Jesus movements” (p. 245).

Mack further relies on John Kloppenborg’s division of Q into earlier and later layers (Kloppenborg, John. The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections. Studies in Antiquity and Christianity. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). “The earliest layer consisting of ‘sapiential instruction’ was now referred to as Q1, and the ‘announcement of judgment’ as Q2. Kloppenborg has also identified a small amount of material that had been added later than the composition of Q2, such as the story of Jesus’ temptation. These later additions were referred to as Q3” (p. 44). The first and earliest layer consists of pithy sayings that tend to be somewhat counter-cultural, which one would expect from a cynic-sage. They consist of sayings such as, “Give to anyone who asks, and if someone takes away your belongings, do not ask to have them back,” and, “Don’t judge and you won’t be judged,” and, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.”

Based on a few sayings that are found in Q1 and the maxim that there is always a community behind a text (p. 41), Mack reconstructs a highly speculative scenario of what the earliest Jesus people were like, how they lived, what they believed and what they didn’t believe. They were nothing like Jews. Jewish elements, such as apocalyptic pronouncements of judgment, didn’t enter into the Q tradition until the Q2 layer. Based on the three layers, Mack tells the story of an emerging and developing community who eventually merged with the Christ cult as Mark wrote his gospel (p. 178). The Christ cult itself emerged from some of the original Jesus people who migrated to Syria (p. 216). The message of the Christ cult was that Jesus died and rose from the dead, but the message was placed in a mythological once upon a time, and not a specific time and place (p. 219). It wasn’t until Mark’s gospel was written that Jesus was placed in a specific historical context.

Mack’s reconstruction of Christian origins is problematic on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin. He weaves an elaborate scenario of the developing thought of the first Jesus people based on the scant evidence he is left with after a highly speculative reconstruction of its literary history. Without blushing, he arrives at a Hellenistic group of counter-cultural cynics formed around the memory of Jesus without the slightest corroborating evidence that such people ever even existed. No hint of their existence has ever been forthcoming. The evidence we do have of the earliest Christians completely contradicts Mack’s scenario. Yet Mack dismisses the positive evidence we do have as myth while thinking his own reconstruction to be sober history. It would seem that Mack has created a myth of his own, and one cannot miss the irony that he begins his reconstruction with the words, “Once upon a time…”(p. 1).

The irony is further evident in the fact that Mack claims the kerygma (proclamation) of the Christ cult was itself set in a “once upon a time.” His claim is obviously false, though. In the earliest literature we have from the Christ cult, which is Paul’s letters, we see that Jesus was a real person who died in the recent past. Paul was personally acquainted with Jesus’ brother, James (Galatians 1:19). Jesus was a contemporary of many who were still alive, so the kerygma certainly wasn’t placed in any once upon a time. It was placed in recent history, and he had living followers who had been personally acquainted with him during his ministry.

Mack’s reconstruction is based on speculation upon speculation. He begins with what is most widely accepted among scholars (the 2SH) and gradually piles on the speculation. But even the 2SH is not without its rivals, and Q itself is only a hypothetical source. It isn’t a gospel document that archaeologist have discovered. If it ever did exist, no copy of it has ever been found. The reconstructions of it from the synoptic gospels are themselves speculative. Mack takes this speculative reconstruction of a hypothetical source and further divides it into three layers (more speculation) and then arranges the three layers from earliest to latest (even more speculation). Then, based on what he deems represents the earliest layer of tradition, Mack makes speculative pronouncements of what the Jesus people did not believe.

One of the rival solutions to the synoptic problem is the Griesbach hypothesis (GH). According to the GH, Matthew was written first. Luke used Matthew as his primary source. Then Mark used both Matthew and Luke as his sources. The GH dispenses with Q since it is unnecessary to explain why Matthew and Luke sometimes agree against Mark. Although not widely accepted, the GH has some arguments in its favor. Some of the reasons Mark is more widely thought to have been written first is because almost all of it is found in Matthew and Luke and because Matthew and Luke both agree in their order when they follow Mark but then diverge when they are not following Mark. It seems more natural to think that if someone were to write a new gospel, he would add to his source rather than take away from it, so it’s more likely that Matthew and Luke added to Mark rather than that Mark abbreviated Matthew and Luke. The GH has a somewhat plausible answer to the objection, though. It may be the case that Mark wrote his gospel in order to harmonize Matthew and Luke. Mark’s gospel includes material from Matthew and Luke where they agree in both content and order, and it excludes material where Matthew and Luke do not agree, which is what we would expect if Mark were attempting a harmonization. The case that Mark used Matthew and Luke is strengthened by the fact that Mark contains several explanatory clauses not found in Matthew or Luke. For example, Mark 2:15 says, “Many tax-gatherers and sinners were dining with Jesus and his disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following him” (Compare Matt 9:10//Luke 5:29). Mark 3:29-30 says, “’Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin,’ because they were saying, ‘He has an unclean spirit’” (Compare Matthew 12:32//Luke 12:10). Mark 7:18-19 says, “’Do you not understand that whatever goes into the man from outside cannot defile him; because it does not go into his heart, but into his stomach, and is eliminated?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.)” (Compare Matthew 15:17). In Mark 11:13, Jesus went to a fig tree and “found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs” (Compare Matt 21:19; see also Matt 17:4//Mark 9:5-6//Luke 9:33 and Mark 16:4//Luke 24:2). Q is unnecessary in the GH because Luke used Matthew.

Another possible solution to the synoptic problem is the Farrer hypothesis (FH), which has been gaining in popularity in recent years. The FH keeps Markan priority but dispenses with Q by maintaining that Luke used Matthew as well as Mark. There are good reasons to accept the FH, not least of which is due to the numerous major and minor agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark in triple tradition material. There is a sliding scale from double tradition (material in Matthew and Luke but not Mark) to major agreements (where Matthew and Luke agree substantially against Mark in triple tradition) to minor agreements (where Matthew and Luke agree in minor details against Mark in triple tradition). Since there is a sliding scale, these categories are artificial. The agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark vary in degree. There are agreements in spelling, wording, and chronology, and there are agreements of omission and addition. The following example has agreement against Mark in three categories: omission, addition, and wording. [I did my best to make the texts line up so you could see the differences more clearly. Where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark, I coloured the words green. Where Mark has something that is omitted in Matthew and Luke, or where Mark's wording is different than Matthew and Luke, I've coloured it in red.]

Matthew 8:2-4	Mark 1:40-44	Luke 5:12-14
And behold a leper came to him, and bowed down to him, saying, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” And he stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, “I am willing; be cleansed.”	And a leper came to him, beseeching him and falling on his knees before him, and saying to him “If you are willing, you can make me clean.” And moved with compassion, he stretched out his hand, and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.”	And it came about that while he was in one of the cities, behold, there was a man full of leprosy; and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face and implored him, saying "Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.” And he stretched out his hand, and touched him, saying, “I am willing; be cleansed.”

It would be a remarkable coincidence if Matthew and Luke redacted Mark independently of each other and yet their redactions agree with each other, so these agreements are best explained by the fact that Luke used Matthew and sometimes chose Matthew’s wording over Mark’s. If Luke used Matthew, that also accounts for the material shared by Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark, thus dispensing with any need to postulate a hypothetical source such as Q.

To account for the major agreements, Q theorists suppose that there is some Mark/Q overlap. Either Mark and Q happen to contain the same material, or Mark used Q as a source. Using Mark/Q overlap to explain the agreements is problematic for Burton Mack’s case, though, for three reasons. First, minor agreements appear in almost every case of triple tradition material, and there are far too many of them to brush off as coincidence. Second, Q would have to contain substantially more material (including narrative) than Q theorists (and Burton Mack in particular) are willing to admit. Third, some of what Q would have to contain completely contradicts Mack’s thesis. Mack argues that the Q community had no belief or interest in Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection, but there are agreements between Matthew and Luke against Mark both in the passion narrative and in Jesus’ prediction of his resurrection.

Matthew 16:20-21	Mark 8:30-31	Luke 9:21-22
Then he warned the disciples that they should tell no one that he was the Christ. From that time Jesus Christ began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.	And he warned them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.	But he warned them, and instructed them not to tell this to anyone, saying, “The son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised up on the third day.”

Matthew and Luke agree in wording against Mark on their prediction of Jesus’ resurrection. Whether we account for this agreement by saying Luke was using Matthew (which dispenses with Q) or by saying this is an example of Mark/Q overlap (which means Q has a resurrection prediction), Burton Mack’s thesis is in trouble. The following agreement is also problematic for Mack’s thesis because it is part of the passion narrative.

Matthew 26:67-68	Mark 14:65	Luke 22:63-64
Then they spat in his face and beat him with their fists; and others slapped him and said, “Prophesy to us, you Christ; who is the one who hit you?”	And some began to spit, at him, and to blindfold him, and to beat him with their fists, and to say to him, “Prophesy!”	And the men who were holding Jesus in custody were mocking him, and beating him, and they blindfolded him and were asking him, saying, “Prophesy, who is the one who hit you?”

Given the above two alternatives to the 2SH, the Q hypothesis appears to be ad hoc. It is not necessary to postulate a hypothetical document to explain the agreement between Matthew and Luke when it is more simple to suppose that Luke used Matthew. (See The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem by Mark Goodacre.)

Let us suppose the 2SH is correct, though, and there was a common source used by both Matthew and Luke other than Mark. Even if that were the case, it is impossible to reconstruct the document from the synoptic gospels with any degree of certainty. Because of the sliding scale from major to minor agreements between Matthew and Mark, it is impossible to tell what Q said, for where do we draw the line? Mack thinks that Mark actually used Q in writing his gospel (p. 178), but if that is the case, then anything found in all three gospels could have been in Q. That includes all the elements of the Jesus movement that Mack denies were a part of the Q community, such as the notion that Jesus was the messiah, that he died for sins, and that he was raised from the dead. Mack’s whole thesis depends on an argument from silence. It is based on what a speculative reconstruction of a hypothetical document did not say rather than what it did say.

Let us continue, though, and assume that we have a fairly accurate reconstruction of what Q said. Doing so still causes Mack some problems. The division between the three layers of Q basically just amount to dividing them up according to categories—moral teachings in Q1, apocalyptic pronouncements of judgment and the coming kingdom of God in Q2, and miscellaneous in Q3. One could arrive at a different result just by using different categories. The reason for dividing moral teachings from apocalyptic pronouncements is because of the difficulty in reconciling the two. If the end of the world is about to happen, so the argument goes, there’s no reason for Jesus to prescribe how people ought to live their lives (pp. 29-39). If understood from a Jewish perspective, though, morality and apocalyptic are inseparable. The Jews believed that “defection from the paths of Torah had caused persecution and exile. Fidelity to its commandments would be rewarded by an ingathering of the dispersed and Yahweh’s special providence” (Goldberg, David J. and John D. Rayner, The Jewish People: Their History and Their Religion, (London: Pinguin Books, 1987), 52). The whole basis of the pharisaic movement was that personal piety would result in a return from exile and an independent nation with God’s kingdom established on earth. With that background in mind, there is no problem reconciling ethical teachings with apocalyptic pronouncements of judgment. In fact, it would be odd if predictions of judgment were not accompanied by ethical teachings since judgments were coming on those who were living immoral lives. Most of the pronouncements of judgment in Q2 are accompanied by admonitions of repentance. For example, in Q2, Jesus said, “The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment and condemn this generation. For they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and look, something greater than Jonah is here.” Jesus expected the people of his own generation to repent at his preaching just as Nineveh repented at Jonah’s preaching, and the reason was the same in both cases: judgment was coming.

Let us continue to be generous and assume that Q1, Q2 and Q3 represent legitimate layers of tradition. Mack’s thesis is still not salvaged, for he also relies on Kloppenborg’s chronology, placing Q1 earlier than Q2, and that assumption is questionable. Logically speaking, pronouncements of judgment ought to come before ethical teachings because it is the impending doom that gives the ethical teachings their force. It is because judgment is coming that we ought to be moral, so Q2 is logically prior to Q1. Mack knows that apocalyptic pronouncements of the coming kingdom of God is thoroughly Jewish, so he needs to place Q2 sayings later than Q1. But Mack acknowledges that “The kingdom of God is mentioned in seven sayings at the Q1 level.” Mack attempts to salvage his thesis by pointing out that none of the kingdom of God sayings at the Q1 level speak of the kingdom of God in an apocalyptic sense and then triumphantly announces, “Thus the old apocalyptic hypothesis can safely be set aside” (pp. 123-124). The circularity of his argument is hard to miss. The reason Mack finds no apocalyptic references to the kingdom of God in Q1 is because by definition apocalyptic sayings belong to Q2. If there actually were apocalyptic sayings in Q1, Mack would have placed them in Q2 simply because that’s the way he has defined his categories.

If we continue to be generous and assume that Q1 is the earliest layer of Q, and if we assume that Mack’s reconstruction of what they did not believe is accurate, will we be granting Mack the day? No, we won’t. At this point, Mack faces an insurmountable problem because he has no basis upon which to claim that the Q1 community is earlier and more authentic than the Christ cult. He simply asserts that “Q reveals what Jesus people thought about Jesus before there was a Christian congregation of the type reflected in the letters of Paul, and before the idea of a narrative gospel was even dared” (p. 245). Even if we grant the entire house of cards its legitimacy, we end up with the realization that Mack’s conclusion is actually worse than speculative; it is completely arbitrary. But that may itself be too generous, for the actual evidence shows that the earliest followers of Jesus were thoroughly Jewish, and they actually did believe Jesus was the Christ, that he died for sins, and that he was raised from the dead.

The Book of Mormon 18/18

2009-07-20T00:05:00.000-04:00

Yay! You made it to the last post in this series. So far, I've been breaking up the posts topically, but today is miscellaneous day. I'm just going to talk about a few verses in the BOM I found interesting.

Jacob 2:27 says, "Wherefore, my brethren, hear me, and hearken to the word of the Lord: For there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife; and concubines he shall have none." This verse jumped out at me because of the LDS Church's association with polygamy in the past. They still believe in polygamy in the afterlife, just not this life since it's against the law.

In 2 Nephi 3:6-25, there's a prophecy predicting the coming of Joseph Smith. It doesn't say "Joseph Smith," but it's pretty obvious that's who it's talking about. His name will be Joseph, and his father's name will also be Joseph. It says he will be a seer, and "he shall be great like unto Moses." It predicts that he will convert the native Americans with the use of the BOM and the Bible. I thought it rather crass of Joseph Smith to insert such a convenient prophecy about himself. Later on in the book, he adds that a seer is greater than a prophet (Mosiah 8:15).

In Alma 18:1ff, it says that the Lamanites referred to their god as "the Great Spirit," which I thought was interesting since in a lot of Indian movies I've seen, the Indians refer to their god as "the Great Spirit." I'm sure Joseph Smith knew about that.

Alma 34:35 says, "For behold, if ye have procrastinated the day of your repentance even until death, behold, ye have become subjected to the spirit of the devil, and he doth seal you his; therefore, the Spirit of the Lord hath withdrawn from you, and hath no place in you, and the devil hath all power over you; and this is the final state of the wicked." This verse seems to contradict the Mormon belief in baptisms for the dead. They believe that if a person doesn't become Mormon while they are alive, somebody else can be baptized on their behalf once they are dead and know the truth. That allows them to go on to exaltation.

In 3 Nephi 28:4-9, Jesus tells three of his disciples that they will never die. According to Moroni--the last person to write in the BOM--the three disciples were still alive. By then, they were almost 400 years old. Presumably, they are still alive today. I went to Yahoo Answers and asked if anybody knew who they were or whether they were members of the LDS church. It makes you wonder. According to the Mormons, the true church completely disappeared from the face of the earth until Joseph Smith restored it, but if those three disciples were faithful, then it seems like they would constitute the church through the ages, and the true church did not disappear.

None of the Mormons claimed to know who they were, and some speculated about whether they were members of the LDS Church or not, but they all agreed they were still around. They also said the apostle, John, was still around. They claimed, based on John 21:22-24, that John got the same promise. But John 21:23 explicitly denies that John got any such promise. It says, "Jesus did not say to him that he would not die." I went back and forth with some of the Mormons through private messages, and they just could not see it, which left me scratching my head.

4 Nephi 1:17 says, "There were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites." I just thought that was funny.

Mormon 8:21-22 says that God will fulfill all his promises. What about the promises in the Old Testament to always bring the whole house of Israel back to Palestine?

Ether 13:2-4 says that America will be the place where the New Jerusalem will come down out of heaven.

There ye have it!

The Book of Mormon 17/18

2009-07-17T00:05:00.001-04:00

Now I'm going to talk about a few verses from the BOM on the subject of grace.

For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do. (2 Nephi 25:23-24)

Therefore, blessed are they who will repent and hearken unto the voice of the Lord their God; for these are they that shall be saved. And may God grant, in his great fulness, that men might be brought unto repentance and good works, that they might be restored unto grace for grace, according to their works. (Helaman 12:23-25)

Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God. (Moroni 10:32).

I remember the subject of grace came up when I was talking to the Bishop. I had told him I hoped to be able to share the doctrines of grace with Kay. He asked me what I meant by "grace," and I told him I understood it to mean "unmerited favour--when God does something for us wholly undeserving." I don't remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect of God granting grace in proportion to a person's good works.

But that is exactly what Paul said grace was not. Paul said, "But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works, otherwise grace is no longer grace" (Romans 11:6). The Mormon view of grace doesn't even make sense. Even Mormons will agree that salvation is by the grace of God. 2 Nephi 10:24 says that "it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved." But what are we being saved from? Why do we need to be saved? It is because we sin, and because we sin, we are under the wrath of God. But God shows mercy by giving us eternal life in spite of our sins. He spares us from the wrath we deserve, and that is the grace he shows us. It follows that the more you sin, the more grace you need. Likewise, Paul said, "where sin increased, grace abounded all the more" (Romans 5:20). But that is exactly the opposite of the Mormon view where you are given grace according to your good works. The better you live, the more grace you get. Essentially, you earn grace by living properly. That view makes no sense at all since the more righteously you live, the less grace you need.

I told the Bishop this issue of grace was probably the biggest difference between us, and he agreed.

I wonder if any Mormon has ever met the requirements of the Book of Mormon for obtaining God's grace. Has any Mormon ever done all they could do as 2 Nephi 25:23-24 requires? Has any Mormon ever denied himself of all ungodliness as Moroni 10:32 requires?

Part 18

The Book of Mormon 16/18

2009-07-14T00:05:00.001-04:00

Another thing that causes me to doubt the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient American document is that it quotes or alludes to parts of the Bible that were written after Lehi left the land of Jerusalem and went to America. There are far too many of them to list, so I'll only list a few. If you're fairly familiar with the Bible, I recommend reading the BOM, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

2 Nephi 6:5-8:25 (and other places, e.g. Mosiah 14:1ff) quote from Second Isaiah (i.e. Isaiah 40-55), saying, "And there are many things which have been spoken by Isaiah which may be likened unto you, because ye are of the house of Israel. And now, these are the words..." In all fairness, there's dispute about when Second Isaiah was written. The more conservative scholars will say it was written before the exile by Isaiah himself, but most people think it was written during the exile by somebody other than the Isaiah of First Isaiah (i.e. Isaiah 1-39). I'm not sure myself, but I lean toward the majority.

2 Nephi 2:5 says, "And by the law no flesh is justified," which is just what Paul said in Romans 3:20.

Alma 5:38-39 says, "Behold, I say unto you, that the good shepherd doth call you; yea, and in his own name he doth call you, which is the name of Christ; and if ye will not hearken unto the voice of the good shepherd, to the name by which ye are called, behold, ye are not the sheep of the good shepherd. And now if ye are not the sheep of the good shepherd, of what fold are ye? Behold, I say unto you, that the devil is your shepherd, and ye are of his fold." This passage is a clear allusion to the parable of the good shepherd in John 10.

Alma 5:52 says, "And again I say unto you, the Spirit saith: Behold, the ax is laid at the root of the tree; therefore every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be hewn down and cast into the fire, yea, a fire which cannot be consumed, even an unquenchable fire." John the Baptist said the same sort of thing in Luke 3:9.

Alma 19:10 says, "And Ammon said unto her: Blessed art thou because of thy exceeding faith; I say unto thee, woman, there has not been such great faith among all the people of the Nephites." That's an allusion to Luke 7:9 where Jesus says, "I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such great faith."

Alma 26:12 says, "Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise his name forever." Alma is alluding to Philippians 4:13 which says, "I can do all things through him who strengthens me," and 2 Corinthians 10:17 which says, "But he who boasts, let him boast in the Lord" and 2 Corinthians 12:5-10 where Paul talks about the thorn in his flesh.

Alma 38:13 says, "Do not pray as the Zoramites do, for ye have seen that they pray to be heard of men, and to be praised for their wisdom." In Matthew 6:5, Jesus said, "And when you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full."

Mormon 9:27 says to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling before him," which is just what Paul said in Philippians 2:12.

In Ether 8:10ff there a story that closely parallels the story in Mark 6 about the beheading of John the Baptist.

Ether 12:6 says, "faith is things which are hoped for and not seen," which comes from Hebrews 11:1, and the rest of Ether 12 parallels the discourse on faith in Hebrews 11.

Moroni 7:45 says, "And charity suffereth long, and is kind, and envieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things." That comes from 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, which says in the KJV, "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things."

Moroni 10:8-17 comes from 1 Corinthians 12:4-11. It says, "And there are different ways that these gifts are administered; but it is the same God who worketh all in all; and they are given by the manifestations of the Spirit of God unto men, to profit them. For behold, to one is given by the Spirit of God, that he may teach the word of wisdom; And to another, that he may teach the word of knowledge by the same spirit...And again, to another, the interpretation of languages and of diverse kinds of tongues. And all these gifts come by the Spirit of Christ; and they come unto every man severally, according as he will."

Dagoods asked me a while back what criteria I would use to determine whether there was a dependence between sources. I didn't have a clear set of criteria, but one criteria I said I think establishes a literary dependence is the use of exact wording. But these parallels in the BOM are enough to convince me that there was a literary dependence. The BOM obviously borrows from the New Testament which, if the story is true, the authors of the BOM could not have possibly been familiar with. That leads me to believe the BOM is not a translation of an ancient document, but was a document written by somebody who was familiar with the New Testament--somebody like Joseph Smith and his friends.

Part 17

The Book of Mormon 15/18

2009-07-11T00:05:00.001-04:00

In John 3:17, 1 Timothy 1:15, and Matthew 9:12-13, it says that Jesus did not come into the world to judge the world or to call the righteous. Rather, he came into the world to save sinners. But the Jesus of the New Testament is unlike the Jesus of the BOM in this regard. In 3 Nephi 9, Jesus makes his appearance in America and utterly destroys sixteen different cities, burning some with fire and causing others to sink into the ocean or be buried beneath hills. These events were all judgments for the wickedness and unrighteousness of the inhabitants of those cities. Then Jesus offers the gospel to the rest, saying, "O all ye that are spared because ye were more righteous than they, will ye not now repent of your sins, and be converted, that I may heal you?" (3 Nephi 9:13).

I went to Yahoo Answers and asked, "Did Jesus come to call the righteous or did he come to call sinners? If he came to call the sinners, why did he destroy them BEFORE offering the gospel? Why did he offer the gospel to the righteous? If they are righteous, why do they need to be saved? Or am I misunderstanding 3 Nephi 9, John 3:17, Matthew 9:12-13, and 1 Timothy 1:15? Or is the New Testament unreliable? Or is the BOM unreliable?"

Some Mormons argued that there was no inconsistency since God had destroyed cities in the Old Testament. I grant that there is no inconsistency on God's part in destroying cities because of sin. The inconsistency is in the mission of Jesus when he came to earth--whether he came to call the righteous or sinners.

Other Mormons said that all these people had already heard the gospel, and because they were so wicked, there was no hope for them. The survivors were not without sin; they just weren't as sinful as those Jesus destroyed. There was still hope for them.

Part 16

The Book of Mormon 14/18

2009-07-08T00:05:00.001-04:00

There are a few passages in the BOM that basically say that faith and knowledge are mutually exclusive. You can only have faith as long as you don't have knowledge, and once you know something, you can no longer exercise faith in it.

Alma 32:17-18 "Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe. Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it."

I thought this was an interesting passage because the New Testament seems to teach that faith is necessary for salvation. But Alma 32:17-18 says that if you have signs, then you have knowledge, and if you have knowledge, then you cannot have faith; it follows that if you have signs, then you cannot have faith. But Jesus performed many signs for his apostles, including rising from the dead. It would seem to follow that the apostles did not have faith. And also the Nephites saw many signs in the sky indicating that Jesus had been born, and then had died, and then he even appeared to them. I went to Yahoo Answers and asked, "Did this nullify their faith, and if so, did it ruin their salvation? Or is faith not necessary for salvation?" Unfortunately, I didn't get any straight answers. One person said it required faith in the first place to recognize the signs, and that the signs didn't nullify their faith; they only strengthened their faith.

That brings us to the next passage:

Alma 32:26-34 "Now, as I said concerning faith--that it was not a perfect knowledge--even so it is with my words. Ye cannot know of their surety at first, unto perfection, any more than faith is a perfect knowledge. But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in your, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my words. Now, we will compare the word unto a seed. Now, if ye give place, that a seed may be planted in your heart, behold, if it be a true seed, or a good seed, if ye do not cast it out by your unbelief, that ye will resist the Spirit of the Lord, behold, it will begin to swell within your breasts; and when you feel these swelling motions, ye will begin to say within yourselves--It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me. Now behold, would not this increase your faith? I say unto you, Yea; nevertheless it hath not grown up to a perfect knowledge. But behold, as the seed swelleth, and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, then you must needs say that the seed is good; for behold it swelleth, and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow. And now, behold, are ye sure that this is a good seed? I say unto you, Yea; for every seed bringeth forth unto its own likeness. Therefore, if a seed groweth it is good, but if it groweth not, behold it is not good, therefore it is cast away. And now, behold, because ye have tried the experiment, and planted the seed, and it swelleth and sprouteth, and beginneth to grow, ye must needs know that the seed is good. And now, behold, is your knowledge perfect? Yea, your knowledge is perfect in that thing, and your faith is dormant; and this because you know, for ye know that the word hath swelled your souls, and ye also know that it hath sprouted up, that your understanding doth begin to be enlightened, and your mind doth begin to expand."

Let me summarize that for people who don't want to read the whole thing. Basically, it's saying that you can do an experiment where you entertain an idea, either exercising a small degree of faith or at least wanting it to be true. If the object of your faith is good or true, then your faith will grow. It will get stronger and stronger. Eventually, you will reach certainty, at which point you no longer have faith or belief; rather, you have knowledge. So knowledge is epistemological certainty.

When I talked to the Bishop, he read this whole passage to me. Before he got to the end, I was on the edge of my seat, and I said, "That's one of the passages I wanted to ask you about!" Remember, I didn't know I was going to meet with the Bishop that day, so I didn't have my notes with me. Earlier in the conversation, I had asked the Bishop whether he believed Joseph Smith was a prophet, the Book of Mormon was an ancient document translated by Joseph Smith, and the LDS Church was the true church of Christ restored by Joseph Smith. He said, "I don't believe it; I know it." So I questioned him on what he meant by saying he knew it. What did he mean by "know"?

We went back and forth because he wasn't really giving me straight answers, but after a little frustration, we finally arrived at his definition of knowledge. He simply equates knowledge with epistemological certainty. To believe something means to have some degree of doubt, but to know something means to have no doubt at all.

Words are defined by their use, so I suppose I can't quibble with the way the BOM uses the word, "knowledge," but I don't think that is what people usually mean by the word. After all, it's possible to be absolutely certain about something and still be wrong. And it hardly seems possible to know something that isn't true. You can't know that the earth is flat if the earth is not really flat. It seems to me that before you can know something, it has to at least be true.

And to believe something means to think it's true. You'd be contradicting yourself if you said, "I believe my cat is pregnant, but I know she is not." So before you can know something, it has to be true, and you have to think it's true.

But it's possible for something to be true, for you to think it's true, and you still don't know it. A person might think they will win the lottery, and maybe they will win the lottery, but that doesn't mean they knew it. They are just an optimistic person who made a lucky guess. It's not really knowledge unless you have some sort of reason or justification for thinking it's true. Justification is what connects the belief inside your mind with the reality outside your mind. Without that connection, any correspondence between your mental states and the external world is merely a coincidence.

So knowledge is justified true belief. I think that's how most people use the word, whether they've thought about what they mean by it or not. Since knowledge is justified true belief, knowledge and belief cannot be mutually exclusive. Belief is necessary for knowledge.

Here is one last passage from the BOM about faith and knowledge:

Ether 3:18-19 "And he ministered unto him even as he ministered unto the Nephites; and all this, that this man might know that he was God, because of the many great works which the Lord had showed unto him. And because of the knowledge of this man he could not be kept from beholding within the veil; and he saw the finger of Jesus, which, when he saw, he fell with fear; for he knew that it was the finger of the Lord; and he had faith no longer, for he knew, nothing doubting."

I think this is a good example of why you have to be careful to define your terms when you're talking with people. Any Christian might say they know the gospel is true, but when Mormons say they know it's true, they mean they have absolute certainty.

Since I had that discussion with the Bishop, I have noticed that a lot of Mormons will say they know their religion is true, rather than merely believing it to be true. The next time a Mormon tells me that, I think I'll question them on the issue of faith and say, "Does that mean you don't have any faith?"

Part 15

The Book of Mormon 13/18

2009-07-05T00:10:00.001-04:00

The BOM is like the Bible in some ways. The New Testament addresses theological issues the people were dealing with in the first century. They were dealing with the issue of eating meat sacrificed to idols, whether gentile converts had to be circumcised, etc. The BOM does the same thing. It addresses theological issues people were dealing with in the 19th century. The two major rival churches where Joseph Smith grew up were the Methodists and the Presbyterians--one group believing in predestination and the other putting a strong emphasis on free will.

In Alma 31, the author talks about the Zoramites who separated themselves from the Nephites. They were bad people, "perverting the ways of the Lord" (Alma 31:1). The author of Alma gives us what is essentially a statement of beliefs of the Zoramites that included: "we believe that thou art God, and we believe that thou art holy, and that thou wast a spirit, and that thou art a spirit, and that thou wilt be a spirit forever," and that "thou hast elected us that we shall be saved, whilst all around us are elected to be cast by thy wrath down to hell" (Alma 31:15,17). Some of the beliefs it explicitly says are in error, but it doesn't say they are all in error, so I went to Yahoo Answers and asked about it.

The Mormons who answered said all of the beliefs of the Zoramites mentioned were in error. God is not a spirit. He has a body of flesh and bone. The Mormon view seems to be an outright denial of John 4:24, which says that God is a spirit. I've heard some Mormons reconcile John 4:24 with their view by saying God is both flesh and spirit.

Some of them said they do believe in predestination (they prefer to say "foreordination"), but the Zoramites were mistaken to think they were foreordained to salvation and everybody else wasn't.

A few of them made a distinction between "foreordination" and "predestination," and they thought passages such as Romans 8:29-30 and Ephesians 1:5 and 11 are talking about foreordination rather than predestination. The difference is that predestination means you're chosen for salvation regardless of how you live your life, which removes the principle of moral agency, whereas foreordination is conditioned on our faithfulness.

This view seems to be contrary to what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:27-31:

But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise...that no man should boast before God. By his doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and the righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, that, just as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord."

The reason boasting is excluded is because it is by God's doing that we are in Christ, not our own doing. If our being chosen depended on our doing, then we'd have something to boast about. As Paul also said in Romans 4:2, "If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about." In Romans 3, Paul says that "all have sinned," and that they are "justified as a gift by his grace," through faith, and because of this, Paul says, "Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law" (Romans 3:23-28).

It is also contrary to what Paul said in Romans 9:11-18:

For though the twins [Jacob and Esau] were not yet born, and had not done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose according to his choice might stand, not because of works, but because of him who calls, it was said to her, "The older will serve the younger."

That raises the question of whether there is any injustice with God, which Paul answers by quoting where God said to Moses, "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." Then Paul said, "So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy."

Part 14

The Book of Mormon 12/18

2009-07-02T00:05:00.004-04:00

Modalists believe the father, son, and holy spirit are the same person. Trinitarians believe the father, son, and holy spirit are the same God, but they are distinct persons. Mormons believe the father, son, and holy spirit are distinct beings. It seems like these views differ in their degree of distinction between the father, son, and holy spirit. Modalists make no distinctions between them. Trinitarians believe there is a distinction in personhood, but no distinction in being. Mormons believe there is a distinction both in personhood and in being.

But the BOM seems decidedly modalistic.

Alma 11:38-39 "Now Zeezrom saith again unto him: Is the Son of God the very Eternal Father? And Amulek said unto him: Yea, he is the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth, and all things which in them are; he is the beginning and the end, the first and the last."

Alma 11:44 "Now, this restoration shall come to all, both old and young, both bond and free, both male and female, both the wicked and the righteous; and even there shall not so much as a hair of their heads be lost; but every thing shall be restored to its perfect frame, as it is now, or in the body, and shall be brought and be arraigned before the bar of Christ the Son, and God the Father, and the Holy Spirit, which is one Eternal God, to be judged according to their works, whether they be good or whether they be evil."

Mosiah 15:1-4 "And now Abinadi said unto them: I would that ye should understand that God himself shall come down among the children of men, and shall redeem his people. And because he dwelleth in flesh he shall be called the Son of God, and having subjected the flesh to the will of the Father, being the Father and the Son--The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God; and the Son, because of the flesh; thus becoming the Father and Son--And they are one God, yea, the very Eternal Father of heaven and of earth."

Ether 3:14 "Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the world to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and my daughters."

Since Alma 11:44 could also be interpreted in a trinitarian fashion, I posted a question about these scriptures on Yahoo Answers, asking how Mormons understood the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and whether they were modalists, trinitarians, or what. They all told me they believed they were distinct beings.

I've noticed that Mormons typically will use the word "personage" when talking about the father and the son. That caused me a little confusion in the beginning. I remember the Bishop told me toward the end of our conversation that the father and son are distinct personages. At the time, I thought he meant the same thing we trinitarians mean when we say "persons," so I didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

To get around these specific verses that call Jesus the eternal Father, the Mormons on Yahoo Answers told me that Jesus is our Father in a different sense than God the Father is. Jesus is our father in two senses--(1) in the sense that we are reborn through baptism, becoming his sons and daughters, and (2) in the sense that Jesus created our physical bodies.

I went back and read those verses with that in mind, to see if it meshed. I doubt that was the intention of the author of the BOM since Jesus is called "the very Eternal Father" in Alma 11:38-39. If Jesus is the very Eternal Father, then who is that other guy? Mosiah 15:1-4 says explicitly why Jesus is called the father. It says he was called "the Father, because he was conceived by the power of God."

The Mormons on Yahoo Answers also told me that the father, son, and holy spirit are one in unity and purpose--the same sense in which believers are to be one with each other and in which husbands and wives are one with each other. But Alma 11:44 explicitly says they are "one Eternal God," which tells us the sense in which they are one. They are one God; one being.

Since I posted that question, I've seen a lot of Mormons refer to a "godhead," when talking about the father, son, and holy spirit, rather than simply saying "God," like Alma 11:44 does. By "godhead," they seem to mean a council of gods that includes the father, son, and holy spirit.

Some time after Kay gave me her testimony, and I began to read about Mormonism, she warned me that not everybody claiming to be Mormon was part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. There were heretical off-shoots. If the Book of Mormon really is the word of God, then I'd probably be enclined to think the LDS Church was the heretical group, and I'd search out some of these other branches to see if they adhered more closely to the BOM than the LDS Church does. It would be interesting to find out if there are any modalists among them and whether this issue had anything to do with why they split.

In the comment section of Part 1 of this series, Tracy gave me a link to an article by Barry R. Bickmore called "Of Simplicity, Oversimplification, and Monotheism." It's a long article, but I encourage everybody to read the first section--The Unity and Plurality of God. I have never seen a better example of how Mormons redefine words. If you read that section carefully, it sheds a lot of light on why some Mormons will insist that they believe there is only one God, and that we misrepresent them when we say otherwise. It turns out that what they mean by "one God" and by "monotheism" is "more than one God, unified in mind, will, love, and covenant."

I remember having a discussion with Kay several months before I found out she was a Mormon. She asked me what I thought about Mormons, and I brought up the issue of the eternal law of progression and how God was once a man, and how men can become gods. She insisted that I was misrepresenting Mormonism, and that Mormons believe there is only one God. When I told her about how some Mormons qualify that by saying one God for this universe, she still insisted that I was wrong and that there was only one God in all of reality. Now I understand where the confusion came from.

Part 13

The Book of Mormon 11/18

2009-06-30T00:05:00.001-04:00

I had always heard that Mormons believe God has a wife, and that he and his wife had spiritual offspring. We are his offspring. We existed as spirits before we came to earth. Jesus, I had heard, was the literal firstborn of God and his wife. That meant Jesus had a beginning. He was not eternal.

But in a prophecy about Jesus, Mosiah 3:5 says:

For behold, the time cometh, and is not far distant, that with power, the Lord Omnipotent who reigneth, who was, and is from all eternity to all eternity, shall come down from heaven among the children of men, and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay, and shall go forth amongst men, working mighty miracles, such as healing the sick, raising the dead, causing the lame to walk, and the blind to receive their sight, and the deaf to hear, and curing all manner of diseases. (Mosiah 3:5)

I also asked about that on Yahoo Answers, and I learned something new. Mormons don't believe anybody had a beginning of existence. We have all existed from eternity--first as "intelligences," then as spirits, and then as flesh and blood.

That answered another question I had also. The first Mormon missionaries I talked to had told me that God had a father before him, and that father had a father before him, etc. So not even God was eternal. But God is eternal just like everybody else, even if he was once just as we are now--ordinary human beings.

But that is not the BOM view. Moroni 8:18 says, "For I know that God is not a partial God, neither a changeable being; but he is unchangeable from all eternity to all eternity." That's pretty explicit. Not only does God exist from eternity to eternity, but God is unchangeable from eternity to eternity. So he could not have been an intelligence who became a spirit who became flesh and blood who became exalted to godhood. The God described here in the BOM is worlds apart from the god Joseph Smith described in the King Follett Discourse. If the BOM really is another God-given testament of Jesus Christ, then Joseph Smith was a false prophet.

If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,' you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. (Deuteronomy 13:1-3)

Even if the BOM is an ancient American document, and even if it is the word of God, and even if Joseph Smith accurately translated it, he is still a false prophet since he preached a different God from the BOM. According to Deuteronomy 13:1-3, Joseph Smith may have given a sign or wonder by translating the BOM, but that certainly doesn't qualify him as a true prophet.

Part 12

The Book of Mormon 10/18

2009-06-27T00:05:00.001-04:00

I had heard that the LDS Church used to be a racist organization, and that they denied black people the priesthood until about the time of desegregation. Mormons to my knowledge have always denied these allegations. But now I see where they come from. From reading the BOM, I got the impression that the author considered white skin to be beautiful and black skin to be loathsome.

And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin and she was exceedingly fair and white. (1 Nephi 11:13)

And I beheld the Spirit of the Lord, that it was upon the Gentiles, and they did prosper and obtain the land for their inheritance; and I beheld that they were white, and exceedingly fair and beautiful, like unto my people before they were slain. (1 Nephi 13:15)

And he had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus saith the Lord God: I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities. (2 Nephi 5:21-22)

O my brethren [Nephites], I fear that unless ye shall repent of your sins that their skin [the Lamanites] will be whiter than yours, when ye shall be brought with them before the throne of God. (Jacob 3:8)

And the skins of the Lamanites were dark, according to the mark which was set upon their fathers, which was a curse upon them because of their transgression and their rebellion against their brethren, who consisted of Nephi, Jacob and Joseph, and Sam, who were just and holy men. (Alma 3:6)

And it came to pass that those Lamanites who had united with the Nephites were numbered among the Nephites; And their curse was taken from them, and their skin became white like unto the Nephites. (3 Nephi 2:14-15)

I went to Yahoo Answers and posted a question about this. I said, "Do you believe that black people are under a curse? Do you believe that being black is a bad thing? Is it a punishment from God? Do you believe that being white is better than being black? If not, why would God curse Lamanites by making them black, and reward them by making them white?"

All of the Mormons denied that blackness was the curse. Instead, black skin was just a sign that allowed the Nephites to tell who was cursed so they could distinguish between the two people's.

Alma 3:6 explicitly says that the dark skin was the curse. Jacob 3:8 also seems to present a strong case that blackness was the curse. Rather than talking about black and white, it talks about degrees of whiteness in proportion to sin. And Jacob 3:8 is a warning, as if being white is more preferable to being black. And 2 Nephi 5:21-22 seems to clearly indicate that whiteness is delightsome while blackness is loathsome. It explicitly says that God made the Lamanites black so that "they might not be enticing unto my people." Clearly, God was counting on the Nephites to be racists. Or, if not racists, at least to not be very attracted to black people. It was not simply so the Nephites would know who the cursed people were. But judge for yourself.

If blackness was not the curse, then what was the curse?

It would not be surprising at all if this point of view about black people came from the mind of somebody living in America in the 1800's. People used to say that black people were under the curse of Ham. According to this article in Wikipedia, "This racist theory was widely held during the 18th-20th centuries, but it has been largely abandoned since the mid-20th century." There are still people today who believe that theory. I met one just five years ago. It looks to me like Joseph Smith simply inserted a popular myth into his book.

Part 11

The Book of Mormon 9/18

2009-06-24T20:00:00.001-04:00

I noticed some anachronisms while reading the BOM I thought I'd mention. I think anachronisms are one of the strongest evidences against the BOM.

There are several references to synagogues in the new promised land. Keep in mind that Lehi and his people left the land of Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile. Synagogues were an innovation of post-exilic Judaism, so Lehi's people shouldn't have known about them. Yet Alma 16:13 says, "And Alma and Amulek went forth preaching repentance to the people in their temples, and in their sanctuaries, and also in their synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews." Joseph Smith would've known about them, but not Lehi's descendants.

Alma 46:13-15 says all the true believers in Christ who belonged to the church of God were called "Christians" by those who did not belong to the church. That is either an interesting coincidence or it is an anachronism. It's only an accident of history that Christians were called Christians, since according to Acts 11:26, "the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch," presumably by nonbelievers. But it's curious that these people in Alma were being called Christians even before Christ came.

Alma 47:7 makes reference to somebody named "Antipas," which is a Greek name. The Greeks didn't influence the Jews until well after the Babylonian exile.

3 Nephi 2:12 talks about the Lamanites fighting for "their rights, and the privileges of their church and of their worship, and their freedom and their liberty." That sounded like a very American thing to say. At the very least, you'd think the author had been influenced by certain enlightenment ideals.

In 3 Nephi 9:18, Jesus calls himself the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." Alpha and omega would've meant a lot to a Greek speaking audience since they are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, but I don't know what they would've meant to ancient Hebrews who would not have known Greek. The only thing I could figure is maybe the gold plates had the first and last letters of the reformed Egyptian they were written in. Maybe they were translated as alpha and omega since that would've been more familiar to the readers than the 'a' and the 'z.' If so, then reformed Egyptian would have to have been a phonetic script quite unlike Egyptian.

In 3 Nephi 27:3ff, Jesus' disciples asked Jesus what they should call the Church. That struck me as anachronistic since people didn't seem to worry about naming churches until the protestant reformation. Even "Catholic Church" wasn't a proper name so much as a description. "Catholic" means "universal." Of course the issue of naming churches would've made perfectly good sense to somebody like Joseph Smith who was familiar with the Methodist church and the Presbyterian church, but I don't know if it would've made much sense to the disciples of Jesus who were founding the only church there was!

In 2 Nephi 24:29,31, it refers to the land of Israel as "Palestina." Although "Palestine" is derived from the word for "Philistine," the land of Israel was never called "Palestine" until after the Bar Kochba rebellion in the second century. The Romans are the ones who gave it that name. I was curious why the BOM would say "Palestina" instead of "Palestine." According to Wikipedia, the Latin word for Palestine is Palaestina.

I already mentioned the horses, elephants, steel, and all that. Even Ether 7:9 mentions steel swords. The interesting thing about that is that Ether is a record of the Jaradites who migrated to America after the tower of Babel incident, thousands of years before Lehi and his family. They had all died off long before Lehi got to America, but they left their records.

Part 10

The Book of Mormon 8/18

2009-06-21T00:10:00.001-04:00

In the introduction to the BOM, it says that of the three groups written of in the BOM--the Jaredites, the Nephites, and the Lamanites--all were destroyed except for the Lamanites, and the Lamanites "are the principle ancestors of the American Indians."

DNA tests have confirmed that Native Americans came to the Americas from Asia, not the middle east. Mormons are well aware of this. The explanation I've heard most often is that there were other natives here when Lehi's people migrated to America from Jerusalem, and that Lehi's people made up a small percentage of the population of north and south America. Essentially, they are arguing that the Lamanites are not the principle ancestors of the American Indians, and that's why they haven't shown up in DNA tests. These DNA tests have been done extensively in both North and South America, and there have been no traces of any native Americans of Jewish descent.

The BOM itself seems to support the notion that the Lamanites are the principle ancestors of the native Americans. Shortly after Lehi's people got to America, Lehi made a speech in which he said:

And behold, it is wisdom that this land should be kept as yet from the knowledge of other nations; for behold many nations would overrun the land, that there would be no place for an inheritance. Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves. (2 Nephi 1:8-9)

The BOM doesn't mention any civilizations that were already in America that didn't come from Jerusalem, and I get the impression from this passage that there were no natives in the land. They must've spread pretty wide, too, because they built cities, had large populations, and waged massive wars. The "promised land" had to have been pretty big.

In Alma 22, it talks a little bit about the geography of some of the land. In verse 31-32, it mentions two areas of land that share a boarder--Desolation to the north and Bountiful to the south. There is a sea on the east and west of these lands, and it takes a day and a half to walk from the east sea to the west sea along the boarder between Desolation and Bountiful. It goes on to say, "and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward." That sounded to me like a good description of central America. That's the only place where one can walk a day and a half to get from the east sea to the west sea.

But then later we find both the Lamanites and the Nephites in the land of Cumorah, by a hill called Cumorah. That's where the final battle between the Lamanites and the Nephites took place, and according to the official LDS website, the hill Cumorah is in New York. It's where the prophet Moroni hid the gold plates, and that's where Joseph Smith found them. Surely, the Nephites and Lamanites were spread more widely than Mormon apologists seem to think.

And now I, Mormon, would that ye should know that the people had multiplied, insomuch that they were spread upon all the face of the land, and that they had become exceedingly rich because of their prosperity in Christ. (4 Nephi 1:23)

And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south, to the sea north, from the sea west, to the sea east. (Helaman 3:8)

The Lamanites eventually wiped out the Nephites. In Mormon 6:12-15, it says 220,000 Nephites were killed. But this slaughter was merely the last of a long series of battles in which massive numbers of Nephites were killed. And if there were that many Nephites, think how many Lamanites there must've been! In Mormon 5:6, it says the Lamanites were beating the Nephites because the Lamanites were so great in number. Surely, they outnumbered the Nephites. I think it is unlikely that such large numbers of people would be confined to an insignificant area of land.

Toward the end of the BOM, after the Nephites had all been wiped out except for maybe five people, it says, "And now, behold, I say no more concerning them, for there are none save it be the Lamanites and robbers that do exist upon the face of the land" (Mormon 8:9). The Lamanites are descendents of Lehi, who was a Jew who migrated from Jerusalem in 598 BCE.

There is one more piece of evidence that I think indicates the BOM intends to make the Lamanites out to be the principle ancestors of the native Americans. There are two prophecies concerning the Gentiles' interaction with the descendents of the Lamanites.

Nevertheless, thou beholdest that the Gentiles who have gone forth out of captivity, and have been lifted up by the power of God above all other nations, upon the face of the land which is choice above all other lands, which is the land that the Lord God hath covenanted with thy father that his seed should have for the land of their inheritance; wherefore, thou seest that the Lord God will not suffer that the Gentiles will utterly destroy the mixture of thy seed, which are among thy brethren. Neither will he suffer that the Gentiles shall destroy the seed of thy brethren. (1 Nephi 13:30-31)

And now, the thing which our father meaneth concerning the grafting in of the natural branches through the fulness of the Gentiles is, that in the latter days, when our seed shall have dwindled in unbelief, yea, for the space of many years, and many generations after the Messiah shall be manifested in body unto the children of men, then shall the fulness of the gospel of the Messiah come unto the Gentiles, and from the Gentiles unto the remnant of our seed--And at that day shall the remnant of our seed know that they are of the house of Israel, and that they are the covenant people of the Lord; and then shall they know and come to the knowledge of their forefathers, and also to the knowledge of the gospel of their Redeemer, which was ministered unto their fathers by him; wherefore, they shall come to the knowledge of their Redeemer and the very points of his doctrine, that they may know how to come unto him and be saved. (1 Nephi 15:13-14)

These two prophecies seem to be about Europeans coming over to America. They did not "utterly destroy" the native Americans, but they did kill a bunch of them. The native Americans did "dwindle in unbelief," assuming they ever believed in the first place. The "fulness of the gospel" came to the gentiles by way of Joseph Smith restoring the church of Christ. From there, the gospel ought to reach the native Americans. So the BOM presumes that the descendents of the Lamanites are still around, and that they will convert to Mormonism. They must be among the native Americans. That seems to be the assumption of these "prophecies."

Part 9

The Book of Mormon 7/18

2009-06-18T00:10:00.001-04:00

I majored in history when I was in college, so I can't always remember whether I first learned something in grade school or whether I learned it in college. That makes it difficult for me to know what's common knowledge and what isn't. But there were some things in the BOM that didn't seem quite right based on what I've learned in my history classes.

And it came to pass that we did find upon the land of promise, as we journeyed in the wilderness, that there were beasts in the forests of every kind, both the cow and the ox, and the ass and the horse, and the goat and the wild goat, and all manner of wild animals, which were for the use of men. (1 Nephi 18:25)

When I read this, I texted it to Kay who responded by saying something like, "Sounds like the new world." I wanted to say that didn't sound at all like the new world. There were no horses in north or south American until they were introduced by the Spanish. There was a prehistoric horse that once existed in north America, but it was really small, and it became extinct about 12,000 years ago.

I remember after reading this last year that I searched the internet for Mormon responses. I found a web page that had pictures of cave drawings. The cave drawings looked like people riding horses. The author said something like, "Archaeologists call these dogs, but judge for yourself." I would show you a picture, but I can't seem to find it.

I found this FARMS article on "Horses in the Book of Mormon" by Robert R. Bennett. FARMS is a Mormon apologetics organization. He said that "archaeological evidence for the presence of the horse in the pre-Columbian Americas is presently scant and inconclusive." He makes several suggestions, though. One is that perhaps there were so few horses that they just haven't survived in the archaeological record. He says, "the Book of Mormon claims only that horses were known to some New World peoples before the time of Christ in certain limited regions of the New World."

I know Mormon apologists like to argue that the stories in the BOM happened in a small geographical area, but if you just read the book, you don't get that impression. But I also doubt his claim that there were few horses. Just look at some of the references he cites. In Enos 1:21, it says that the Nephites had "many horses." Well, the Nephites were one of the major people's of the BOM, engaged in battles that killed tens of thousands of people. If you ran into a rancher who said he had "many horses," you might think forty would be enough to justify such a claim. But if a group of 50,000 people said they had "many horses," you wouldn't think forty would be enough to justify the claim. So it seems to me that the Nephites, being as populous as they were, had to have had a pretty significant herd. And they weren't the only people who had horses, either.

In 3 Nephi 3:22, it says the Nephites took "their horses, and their chariots, ...and did march forth by thousands and by tens of thousands..." Of course it doesn't say how many horses there were, but I figure if they were significant enough to mention among tens of thousands of people, there must've been a lot of them.

Just a few chapters later in 3 Nephi 6:1, it says, "And now it came to pass that the people of the Nephites did all return to their own lands in the twenty and sixth year, every man, with his family, his flocks and his herds, his horses and his cattle, and all things whatsoever did belong unto them." Now maybe the author was exaggerating when he said they did all return, every man with his horses, but even if half of them had horses, that's still a pretty significant number of horses. And remember that these horses were in the land for hundreds of years, which means many generations of significant herds of horses.

If these horses became extinct, it had to have been fairly recently. At the very latest, they became extinct around the time of Christ, just 2000 years ago. Yet we have no problem discovering a prehistoric horse that became extinct 12,000 years ago. That's not to mention the many mammoths we've found. But no trace of the BOM horses.

Later in the article, Bennett suggests that perhaps Lehi's people saw something similar to a horse and called it a horse when it really wasn't. But there are two problems with that. First, if it wasn't a horse, then what else might one use to pull chariots? A llama, maybe? Second, it casts doubt on the supposed divinely inspired translation of the BOM. After all, words get their meaning from their use. Whatever token the Nephites used to refer to this animal, you would expect that an accurate translation would use the equivalent English word. If the Nephites meant "llama" by whatever word they happened to use, even if it had previously been used of horses, then the correct English translation would've been "llama."

Bennett seems to think the Nephites may have been referring to a tapir as a "horse." Here's a tapir:

Well, I think it's always possible that something existed which we just haven't dug up. I can't dismiss the possibility that there were horses in America during the time of the Nephites and Lamenites. Bennett makes a good point about the Huns and the paucity of horse fossils in their lands in spite of the significance of horses in their culture. But I remain suspicious.

The BOM also mentions extensive use of steel swords, and battles where tens of thousands of people are killed. As far as we know, there was no steel in the Americas until the Spanish brought them over, and I don't think the Israelites had steel in 600 BCE either, but I could be wrong about that. This seems to me to be a bigger problem than horses. Some Mormons have suggested maybe they were talking about other metals and "steel" is just being used in a generic sense to mean "metal." The problem is that "steel" is distinguished from other metals in the BOM.

And I did teach my people to build buildings, and to work in all manner of wood, and of iron, and of copper, and of brass, and of steel, and of gold, and of silver, and of precious ores, which were in great abundance. (2 Nephi 5:15)

A lot has been written on this subject, so I'm just going to leave it at that. There are other things in the BOM that other people have pointed out are anachronistic, like wheat and barley, cows, oxen, etc. But when I was reading the BOM the things that jumped out at me were the horses and the steel swords. The elephants and chariots also jumped out at me. Of course there was the mammoth, but they became extinct something like 10,000 years ago. Here is a picture of a piece of Mayan artwork one Mormon used as evidence:

The author of the article said, "Critics say those are parrots. What do YOU think?" I have to admit they look like elephants to me.

The interesting thing is that among all the crops the BOM mentioned, it didn't say much about the food we know native Americans did grow, such as maize and various kinds of squash.

There is a wealth of Mormon apologetic literature on these subjects. I was interested in knowing if any of this information had ever been submitted for peer review or published in academic journals. I know there are some Mormon academic journals, but I wanted to know if anybody had ever submitted an article to a secular academic journal arguing anything like there being horses, elephants, steel swords, etc. in ancient American civilizations. I posted a question about it on Yahoo Answers. I got a link to Jeff Lindsay's web page, but nobody gave me any references to peer reviewed academic journal articles. I would be interested in knowing whether such articles would survive peer review and what other scholars would say about them.

Part 8

The Book of Mormon 6/18

2009-06-15T00:10:00.001-04:00

A long time ago, I read a book called The Gentile Times Reconsidered by Carl Olof Jonsson. It was about how Biblical, archaeological, and astronomical evidence pointed to 587 BCE as the date for the destruction of the Jewish temple rather than 607 BCE, which is when the Jehovah's Witnesses date it. The book pointed out many problems with Jehovah's Witness chronology.

The BOM also has a specific chronology, so I was curious how it would work out. The BOM repeatedly says that Jesus will be born 600 years after Lehi left Jerusalem (1 Nephi 10:4, 2 Nephi 25:19, etc.). Lehi left Jerusalem in the first year of the reign of Zedekiah (1 Nephi 1:4, 1 Nephi 2:2-4, etc.). That means Jesus should be born 600 years after the 1st year of Zedekiah.

The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in the 11th year of Zedekiah, which was the 19th year of Nebachadnezzar (2 Kings 24-25; 2 Chronicles 36; Jeremiah 39; Jeremiah 52). That happened in 587 BCE, which means that Lehi left Jermusalem in 598 BCE.

If Lehi left Jerusalem in 598 BCE, that means Jesus was born in 3 CE.

But the problem is that according to Matthew 2, King Herod was still alive when Jesus was born. Herod died in 4 BCE, which means Jesus had to have been born in 4 BCE or earlier.

It seems like the only way to make the BOM chronology work is to argue for a different date than 587 BCE for the destruction of the temple, but that date is supported by some pretty strong evidence, which you can read about in Carl O. Jonsson's book. Another way would be to argue for a different date for King Herod's death. I've read (I can't remember where) that some people date Herod's death as late as 1 BCE, but there seems to be a strong consensus in favour of the 4 BCE date.

The footnotes in my copy of the BOM say that Lehi left Jerusalem in 600 BCE, and that Jesus was born in 1 CE. That would put the destruction of the Temple in 589 BCE, and the death of Herod no earlier than 1 CE.

I brought this up in the comment section of this blog and Kevin Winters directed me to a FARMS article called "The Jewish/Nephite Lunar Calender," by Randall P. Spackman, which addressed the points I raised. The rest of what follows is just cut and paste from my response to the article.

The article was actually kind of surprising to me because in the end, the author claimed to have solved one problem, but in doing so, created another--the problem of whether Lehi left Jerusalem in the 1st year of Zedekiah, as Mormon said in the heading of 3 Nephi, or whether he left between 588 and 587 BCE, as the author argued (being the 10th or 11th year of Zedekiah). To deal with THAT problem, the author quoted the preface to the BOM, which says, "And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ."

That is a really interesting response. It sounds like the author is saying in that section that Mormon made a mistake. There's a contradiction in the BOM about when Lehi left Jerusalem. But if that's the case, then why go through this long explanation, trying to reconcile the 600 year prophecy? Why not just begin with this claim about human error and avoid the whole thing?

This "human error" solution creates another problem, too. The introduction of the BOM quotes Joseph Smith as saying that "the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth." If the BOM is fallible, then there isn't an infallible book on earth--neither the Bible nor the BOM. We might as well give up worrying about contradictions and chalk them up to human error.

[I discovered later that Mormons do not subscribe to inerrancy, neither for the Bible, nor for the Book of Mormon. Mormon 8:12 says, "And whoso receiveth this record, and shall not condemn it because of the imperfections which are in it, the same shall know of greater things than these."]

I admit that the author's solution works. I did the math, and, indeed, 600 lunar years (without adding a 13th month every three or so years) is equal to about 582 solar years, so 600 lunar years before 5 BC is 587 BC.

But I am highly skeptical that if this story were true, the Nephites, out of ignorance, would've failed to add the 13th month every 3 or so years. After all, they had every reason the Mesoamericans, Hebrews, and Egyptians had to notice a problem--harvests and festivals, especially. And living in the Hebrew/Egyptian world for much longer than 3 years before leaving like they did, and being acquainted with their calender, surely they would've known about the 13th month.

But if that's the case, then why not just say these are "the mistakes of men" and live with it?

Part 7

The Book of Mormon 5/18

2009-06-12T00:10:00.001-04:00

The first thing that jumped out at me last August when I began to read the BOM was that the characters, who were supposedly Jews, did not have a Jewish worldview.

According to the BOM, there's a fellow named Lehi who took his family and left Jerusalem in the first year of Zedekiah and left for America. That was eleven years before the third exile and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which means Lehi left Jerusalem in 598 BCE. They wandered in the wilderness for eight years, and then built a boat and sailed for America.

"Us" vs. "Them"

In the beginning of the story, while Lehi is prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem, Nephi (the son of Lehi, and the author of 1 Nephi) keeps referring to "the Jews" as "they." In 2 Nephi 29:13, the author distinguishes between the Nephites, the Jews, and the lost tribes of Israel.

After Jesus ascended in the book of Acts, he appeared in America where he chose 12 more disciples. That's the background of this prophecy:

Yea, behold, I write unto all the ends of the earth; yea, unto you, twelve tribes of Israel, who shall be judged according to your works by the twelve whom Jesus chose to be his disciples in the land of Jerusalem. And I write also unto the remnant of this people, who shall also be judged by the twelve whom Jesus chose in this land; and they shall be judged by the other twelve whom Jesus chose in the land of Jerusalem. (Mormon 3:18-19)

Notice how "the remnant of this people" are distinguished from the twelve tribes of Israel.

The promised land

Part of the worldview of Judaism included the promises God gave Abraham that his children would possess the land, and the story of how God delivered the people of Israel from Egypt and brought them into the promised land. It was a land they were promised forever. This worldview affected how they interpreted later historical events. First, the Assyrians scattered the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, leaving only the kingdom of Judah in the south. Few of them ever returned. Then the Babylonians exiled the Jews in three stages culminating in the destruction of the temple and the final exile in 587 BCE. Since that time, the prophets predicted there would be a return from exile that would even include the reunion of Judah and Israel. The whole house of Israel would be able to return from exile and reestablish their national sovereignty. This worldview is what drove the Jews to despair the whole time they were in vassalage to other nations, and it explains why they fought so hard in the Maccabean revolt and the two revolts against Rome to reestablish their national sovereignty.

In the BOM, it talks about the people of Lehi being rescued from Jerusalem in much the same way the Bible talks about the Hebrews being rescued from Egypt. And it talks about wandering in the wilderness for eight years in the same way the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness for forty years. And it talks about the people of Lehi crossing the Atlantic ocean to enter the promised land, which is America, in the same way the Bible talks about the Hebrews crossing the Jordan to enter the promised land, which is Palestine.

Yea, and the Lord said also that: After ye have arrived in the promised land, ye shall know that I, the Lord, am God; and that I, the Lord, did deliver you from destruction; yea, that I did bring you out of the land of Jerusalem. (Nephi 17:14)

While the themes are certainly similar, something is terribly awry.

If the people in the BOM were really Jews, surely they would've thought they were being exiled from the promised land. And they would've thought God would eventually return them to the land of Israel. But instead, it says:

Wherefore, I, Lehi, have obtained a promise, that inasmuch as those whom the Lord God shall bring out of the land of Jerusalem shall keep his commandments, they shall prosper upon the face of this land [America]; and they shall be kept from all other nations, that they may possess this land unto themselves. And if it so be that they shall keep his commandments they shall be blessed upon the face of this land, and there shall be none to molest them, nor to take away the land of their inheritance; and they shall dwell safely forever. (2 Nephi 1:9)

Somebody with a Jewish worldview would've interpreted such a statements as a promise to be banished from the real promised land (i.e. the land promised to Abraham's seed) forever, and ironically, to be banished from the real promised land because of their faithfulness to God's commandments! A real Jew would've seen these supposed promises to Lehi to actually be broken promises since God had promised the land of Israel to Abraham's seed forever, and to always return the people of Israel to that land in fulfillment of his promises and in answer to their obedience.

When Jesus visits America, he tells the people that with the help of the Gentiles, they will build a New Jerusalem in America, and all those who had been scattered by the Gentiles will be gathered into the New Jerusalem (3 Nephi 21:32-24). There is also a New Jerusalem that will come down out of heaven in America (Ether 13:3). The old Jerusalem will also be rebuilt as a holy city, but "it could not be a new Jerusalem for it had been in a time of old" (Ether 13:5). So Israel would be forever split in two.

The law of Moses

There is no veneration of the Mosaic law among the people of the BOM like you see in the Bible. While they spent eight years in the wilderness near the Red Sea, there's no indication that anybody even thought about whether they should go to Jerusalem for any of the pilgrimage festivals, there's no indication that they kept any of the Jewish holidays, and the Sabbath is rarely mentioned. It does say a few times that the people of Nephi kept the law of Moses, but instead of expressing a love for the law like you see in the Old Testament, the BOM talks about the law as if it was just a temporary inconvenience that would be done away with once Christ arrived. For example, several hundred years before Christ, Nephi wrote:

And, notwithstanding we believe in Christ, we keep the law of Moses, and look forward with steadfastness unto Christ, until the law shall be fulfilled. For, for this end was the law given; wherefore the law hath become dead unto us, and we are made alive in Christ because of our faith; yet we keep the law because of the commandments...Wherefore, we speak concerning the law that our children may know the deadness of the law; and they by knowing the deadness of the law, may look forward unto that life which is in Christ, and know for what end the law was given. And after the law is fulfilled in Christ that they need not harden their hearts against him when the law ought to be done away. (2 Nephi 25:24-27)

The temple

In Judaism, there has only ever been one temple or tabernacle at a time. It represented God's dwelling place and his presence among Israel. Priests offered sacrifices on behalf of the people. Jews traveled to Jerusalem on special occasions to offer those sacrifices. The building of the temple was a big deal. David had wanted to do it, but God wouldn't let him. Instead, God said that Solomon would build the temple. Jews in the diaspora never built new temples; they built synagogues.

In the BOM, it says that Nephi built a temple "after the manner of the temple of Solomon" (2 Nephi 5:16). The building of Nephi's temple takes all of one verse to narrate. There's no discussion about God telling Nephi to build the temple or Nephi feeling the need to ask God for such a privilege. There's no discussion of how the temple was dedicated or of its function. But what seems even more odd is that there was no legitimate priesthood to officiate in the temple. In the Bible, there are very strict rules about who can enter the Holy of holies, who can offer sacrifices, the garments they have to wear, etc. The priests were among the sons of Aaron and the tribe of Levi. Lehi's people were from the tribe of Joseph and had no priesthood authority.

According to the footnote in my copy of the BOM, all of this happened between 588 and 570 BCE. The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 BCE, so perhaps there were not two temples at the same time. But eventually, the temple in Jerusalem was rebuilt, so surely there were two temples at one time. There's no indication in the BOM that this would've been a problem. But for somebody with a Jewish worldview, surely something would've seemed awry.

The Messiah

[There is more on the subject in the comment section of Response to a Jew with a View. Some of my comments here were cut and paste from what I wrote there.]

The BOM talks quite a bit more about Jesus Christ than the Old Testament does, and it is quite a bit more explicit than the Old Testament is. In fact, the parts of the BOM that were supposedly written before Jesus arrived seemed to have a fully developed New Testament theology.

But I don't get the impression that the author(s) of the BOM understood what a Jewish messiah was. (I wish I had taken better notes on this subject when I read the BOM so I could demonstrate the point, but I remember that was the impression I had when I read it.) The eschatological messiah in Judaism is a fulfillment of a promise God made concerning the throne of David.

Your [David’s] house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever. (2 Samuel 7:16)

But King Solomon shall be blessed, and the throne of David shall be established before the LORD forever. (1 Kings 2:45)

David’s dynasty came to an end as a result of the Babylonian exile, but the prophets said God would fulfill his promise by raising up a descendant of David who would reestablish his throne and rule forever.

There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will accomplish this. (Isaiah 9:7)

They will live on the land that I gave to Jacob My servant, in which your fathers lived; and they will live on it, they, and their sons and their sons' sons, forever; and David My servant will be their prince forever. (Ezekiel 37:25)

In 1 Kings 2:4 and 8:25, it says that David “shall not lack a man to sit on the throne of Israel,” as long as his sons are obedient. The messianic prophecy in Jeremiah 33:14-22 is explained as a fulfillment of that promise.

But there's no indication that the author(s) of the BOM understood why the messiah had to be from the line of David or that the messiah would be a king, which is striking when you consider how much more there is about the messiah in the BOM than there is in the Old Testament. And considering the fact that Lehi left Jerusalem while Zedekiah was still king, it is conspicuous that among all the discussion of the eschatological messiah in the BOM, there seems to be no question or even curiosity about what became of David's dynasty. Here are some of the BOM's messianic prophecies:

Yeah, even six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem, a prophet would the Lord God raise up among the Jews--even a Messiah, or, in other words, a Savior of the world. (1 Nephi 10:4)

Apparently from this verse, the author thought "messiah" was just another way of saying "savior of the world." Granted, Christians do believe Jesus is the savior of the world, but that is not what "messiah" means.

Wherefore, as I said unto you, it must needs be expedient that Christ--for in the last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name--should come among the Jews. (2 Nephi 10:3)

Here's, it's evident that the author thought "Christ" was just a name. There is another curious reference in this same chapter to the same effect. See if you notice anything odd about this next part:

For according to the words of the prophets, the Messiah cometh six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem; and according to the words of the prophets, and also the word of the angel of God, his name shall be Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (2 Nephi 10:19)

The odd thing about this verse is that the author appears to think "messiah" is a title, whereas "Jesus Christ" is a proper name. It is strange that the translation of the BOM would make such a distinction between "messiah" and "christ," since both mean the same thing. "Messiah" is derived from the Hebrew word for "anointed one," and "christ" is derived from the Greek word for "anointed one." It makes you wonder what the original language of the BOM actually said and whether it made such a distinction. Of course this is just one thing that makes me doubt the BOM is a translation at all, but that is a topic for another blog entry.

For all these reasons, I seriously doubt that the author(s) of the BOM really were Jews. But it would not be surprising if this story was written by somebody in the 19th century who had a Christian upbringing.

Part 6

The Book of Mormon 4/18

2009-06-09T00:10:00.001-04:00

Mormons often ask me how I feel when I read the BOM. I find that a little frustrating because it doesn't matter how I feel when I read it. It only matters whether it's true. I don't think you can tell whether it's true by how you feel when you read it, so it doesn't matter how you feel. I wrote more about that in my series on Mormon epistemology.

I don't mind saying how I felt, though. When I was first visited by the Mormons over ten years ago, I prayed about the BOM like they asked me to, and all I felt was a foreboding. It was the same foreboding I felt before I prayed about it, though. Now I don't attribute this foreboding to the Holy Spirit. I attribute it to the fact that I already had serious doubts about it. But I didn't read the whole BOM back then. I only read the passages the missionaries gave me to read.

Last August, I read the whole BOM. When I met with Kay's bishop later on, he asked me how I felt when I read it. I told him I couldn't remember since I wasn't really thinking about my feelings when I was reading it.

But reading the BOM caused me to have far more doubts about it than I had before I read it. So I don't feel very good about the BOM at all now.

The BOM is much better when read cover to cover. What kept me from reading it before was pure boredom and lack of interest. But I was only reading isolated passages. I couldn't possibly see how it all fit into the story. The BOM isn't like the Bible where you have a collection of independent books from different genres. The BOM is more like a novel. You can read it from cover to cover, and it's just one long story. I think that's the way it ought to be read, at least the first time you read it. Then you can go back and read passages over again and know how they fit in the broader story.

Part 5

The Book of Mormon 3/18

2009-06-06T01:00:00.002-04:00

Before I read the BOM, I read the introductory pages. There's an abridged version of Joseph Smith's story there. Then it says, "For the complete record, see Joseph Smith--History, in the Pearl of Great Price, and History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, volume 1, chapters 1 through 6.

I'm going to abridge the abridgment for you. In 1823, an angel named Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith and told him about a book written on golden plates that he would show Joseph at a later date, and there was a seer stone with the book that would allow Joseph to translate the book. But Joseph was not allowed to show the book to anybody except who he was commanded to or else he would be destroyed.

Moroni appeared to Joseph again, told him to tell his dad what had happened, and Joseph's dad told him it was from God. This time, Joseph went to find the plates. He said, "Covenient to the village of Manchester, Ontario county, New York, stands a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood. On the west side of this hill, not far from the top, under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates, deposited in a stone box." The seer stones, a breastplate, and the golden plates were in the stone box, but Moroni wouldn't let Joseph have them for four more years. But Joseph went there once a year and met with Moroni until then.

Joseph finally got the plates on September 22, 1827, and Moroni told him to protect them until Moroni came back for them. Apparently, lots of people tried unsuccessfully to get them from Joseph, but Joseph was successful in protecting them. Then, once they were translated as The Book of Mormon, Moroni took them away.

In the case of the Bible, there are thousands of fragments of ancient manuscripts. It boggles the mind to think how many copies there must've been for so many thousands of them to have survived for so long. Surely, most of them have not survived.

But with the BOM, there isn't one single shred of manuscript evidence anywhere. The only one that supposedly existed was taken away by an angel. I'm sure there's an explanation for it, but this story just makes me suspicious. Joseph Smith finds some golden plates with ancient writings on them, only lets a handful of people see them (and it's ambiguous whether anybody actually saw them), and then they are taken away to heaven so nobody else can ever examine them. Wouldn't it be great if we could examine them? That is, if they ever existed, which I doubt. I can't prove it, but I suspect this story of an angel taking them away is just a cover up. It is most unfortunate. If they existed, they could possibly vindicate Joseph Smith and the LDS Church. Or they could falsify Joseph Smith and the LDS Church.

Part 4