Where There's a Will ...

 

The wheel of karma

A Chinese student asks me if I believe in fate. He says everyone in his class does.

This is interesting, and I’ve pondered it before. There are not many theists in China. Yet even those who do not believe in God believe in fate: in karma. They believe in karma throughout East and South Asia.

Yet how can there be fate without God? Fate implies the existence of a cosmic, omnipotent and omniscient will. Without a God, the universe should be random and meaningless. There should be no justice.

My student, presented with this assertion, agrees.

In other words, everyone is really a theist. All believe in God’s existence, and all see God as a will; which is to say, a person.  We are divided only by semantic confusion. And by denial of what we know in our hearts to be true.

The Two Kinds of People

 

There are, in this world, two kinds of people: those who accept the existence of God, and those who try to deny it. Never the twain shall meet; these are perfectly incompatible views, like humans and zombies. The instant you accept the existence of the absolute, it is necessarily of absolute importance. Those who do not see it are, at charitable best, insane. They are not in the conversation.

Deniers, similarly, cannot tolerate believers. Ultimately, the existence of God is certain and accessible to reason. To deny God is therefore to turn from God, to dodge the truth. 

People turn from God because they are conscious of doing wrong, or want to do wrong. They don’t want to accept the existence of divine justice. They want to get away with it; like Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes. Religion is a “religious dictatorship.” Anyone who asserts the existence of God, genuinely claims to believe it, is a threat to them, and must be shut down. Churches burned, Christmas markets attacked.

The most obvious tactic is to infiltrate any convenient religious body themselves, and seek to subvert it. This is the Pharisee gambit; they are common in every religion. I became all too familiar with them studying religion in grad school. Within the department, you gained approval by saying the most outrageously skeptical and irreligious thing.  The sincerely religious were mocked as ignorant.

I thank God I escaped that. But it was not easy. Most higher education is cult-like.

Drawing the Line

 

I believe that postmodernism is genuinely satanic. So is transgenderism; so is New Age. So is Pope Francis, who seems always to make things less clear.

They are all relativists: all insist there is no solid truth, and no clear distinctions should be made. 

God, by contrast, is the ultimate, the absolute. Relativism is his opposite and his negation.

Relativists want distinctions to be vague. God and monotheism require firm hard lines, judgements: between good and evil, truth and falsehood, self and other, God and creature, male and female, I and Thou. 

Relativists want everything to remain murky. Jesus wants clarity. He says that he is the light; that we must seek the light; that we must let our light shine.

They Can't All Be Right

 

Bahai Temple, meant to express architecturally the concept that "all religions are one."

One line of attack beloved by atheists is to point to the multiplicity of religions, and argue that since at a minimum all but one must be false, the obvious and only rational conclusion is that they are all false.

Most people are Christian, they will go on to say, simply because their parents were Christian. They have no better reason. Were they born in India, they would be just as certain that Hinduism was true; born in Japan, they would be Buddhist; in Egypt, Muslim.

Perhaps fair—for those who are only nominally religious. For those who are actually religious, the question is never whether you are Christian or Hindu, but whether you are devout.

But why limit this argument to religion? There are a multiplicity of governmental systems. Aside from liberal democracy, there is absolute monarchy, Communism, Fascism, oligarchy, aristocracy, military junta, anarchy, dictatorship, syndicalism, and so forth. All but one of them must be wrong. So the obvious conclusion is that they are all wrong. Most people in Canada or the US believe in liberal democracy only because they happen to live in a liberal democracy, and do not know any better.

Somehow, when applied to anything other than religion, this argument does not sound convincing. We do, most of us, feel confident that we have all the information necessary to make an objective judgement on any other matter: for example, that liberal democracy is the best of these systems. Others, of course, may opt for one of the others.

The argument works only if you start from the presupposition that religion is false.

And perhaps from the false presupposition that “no religion” is an option. Just as “no government” is not a realistic option, we cannot really live without some rules imposed on our behaviour. That is what “religion” means: a “binding.” We need, in the end, to have a purpose. “Atheists” simply find their purpose in some god they do not call God: “Nature,” or “Science,” or “Psychology,” or Marxism  and dialectical materialism, or Freudianism, or Ecology, or Climate Change, or Evolution. Or self.

The question is whether their formulation is better than any of the traditional ones.

There is, after all, far greater consistency among conceptions of God as Yahweh, Allah, Brahman, Gitche Manitou or Ahura Mazda, mostly only the words for “personal supreme being” in different languages, than there is among the various faiths and gods worshipped by atheists.

They can’t all be right.

A New Hope

 

William Lane Craig

Here’s cause for hope. While the postmodern sacred chaos seems all-conquering in the academy, and marching through the culture—something else is happening at the cutting edge of research in departments of philosophy and of physics. There, it looks as though the arguments for atheism have collapsed. The “New Atheism” had a strong popular run recently, but that seems only to have brought the issue, and the true state of affairs, to broader attention. 

And the New Atheism has fizzled. It has fizzled in part under the greater scrutiny all ideas can receive in our information age.

Philosophy is traditionally considered the queen of the sciences: the most advanced academic degree is thus “Doctor of Philosophy.” Similarly, among the materialists, physics rules. And these two, according to William Lane Craig and others, have turned to the “God hypothesis.”

Even neo-Darwinism seems to be in retreat in biology departments. Although the claim was never strong, Darwinism was in the popular mind the main argument against theism. Darwin’s theory, and its proponents, largely kicked off the currently fashionable atheist religion of scientism.

But the intricacies of the genetic code, the need for “multiverses,” a gross violation of Occam’s Razor, to avoid postulating some higher power in physics, and the bizarrely narrow and specific set of circumstances that allow for life in the universe, have forcefully reintroduced the argument from design that the atheists thought Darwin had circumvented.

And if you don’t like that argument for God’s existence, as Craig has quipped, “I have others.”

Thinks move glacially in academics. Once a new truth is established, it takes at least a generation for it to percolate down to undergraduate level—let alone the high school texts, and the general consciousness. I just saw a post on Facebook teasing the revelation that Columbus was not the first European to discover the Americas. There are even still Freudians about. For the direction in any field to change significantly, the current generation of faculty members, who have built their reputations on the prior paradigm, has to die off. People rarely admit mistakes.

But we can perhaps now see the future, and it is divine. 

We must just hope that not too many more churches be burned or torn down from within before we get there.

Jordan Peterson: Lost in a World He Never Made

 

I find Jordan Peterson’s thinking hard to follow. Should I make the effort to figure out what he is trying to say? Is it liable to be anything of substance, or will I be wasting a great deal of time?

The odds are I will be wasting my time. Being able to think clearly and being able to express yourself clearly are almost the same thing.

But I took the time to try to untangle his thinking in this brief interview with Andrew Klavan. Klavan is trying to pin Peterson down on whether he believes in God.

In the talk, I do not think Peterson is trying to be deliberately obscure. Many academics are; enough double-talk and people do not realize you are talking nonsense. Peterson is not like this. Utter sincerity seems to be his dominant trait. It is what is so attractive about him. It is why, I think, he has become so popular and famous; nobody is used to hearing an academic speak so honestly. 

His problem is that, as a social scientist, he does not have the mental tools to handle metaphysical questions, like the existence and nature of God. He almost seems to understand this himself.

“Does God exist? How would I know? I can’t know, and neither can anyone else.”

In fact, the existence of God is knowable in a dozen ways. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says 

“Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of ‘converging and convincing arguments,’ which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.”

That is, there are various philosophical proofs for the existence of God. Peterson’s problem is that there are no, and can be no, scientific proofs for the existence of God—and the only thing he understands is science. There can be no scientific proofs of the existence of God, because science deals only with physical objects, and God is not a physical object.

As though to explain the impossibility, almost as if he understand the problem, Peterson goes on to speak of the objective and the subjective. 

“I don’t understand the relationship between the objective and the subjective. I don’t understand consciousness. From the objective perspective, it’s nothing.”

Because he speaks from a scientific perspective, Peterson is confusing “objective,” “physical,” and “real”; he is assuming they all mean the same thing. Science cannot tell them apart.

The objective is that which exists independently of our experience of it. It abides when we are not witnessing it. For example, the physical world does not cease to exist when we close our eyes.

The physical is what we perceive with our senses: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing.

The real is not “what exists,” although it seems to mean that. Everything conceivable necessarily exists--as a concept, as a perception. We say something is “real” when it exists in the same category of existence we think it does. If we think it exists as a physical object, but it exists only as a concept, it is “unreal.” But on the other hand, we do not call happiness “unreal” because it does not exist as a physical object.

Peterson: 

“Religious experience is subjective, but it is a human universal. It is transpersonal, but it is subjective. We don’t have a category for the transpersonal subjective.”

It is science that does not have a category for the “transpersonal subjective.” But Peterson is wrong on his terminology. God is not subjective—he is objective. He exists when we are not thinking of him. “Transpersonal” means “objective.” By “subjective,” Peterson really means “non-physical.” 

God exists in the non-physical, i.e., spiritual, objective realm. As does heaven, hell, and the angels and saints. As does love, sin, morality, other consciousnesses, and most of what is important in life.

And Peterson, as a social scientist, cannot account for any of it. He is trapped in the world of inanimate things.

So, by extension, is psychology, and social sciences, in general.

The Truth of No Truth

Frank Turek

It must be tough to be a Christian apologist or professional debater, like William Lane Craig or Ravi Zacharias. You can have your arguments well researched, as Craig certainly does; but even so, sooner or later someone is going to come at you with something you had not thought of. And you can be left flat-footed.

I fear that tends to happen with Frank Turek. He is not that well-versed in the philosophy. He seems to get flummoxed. When he gets flummoxed, he will not admit it, but resorts to rhetorical tricks.

The person who sincerely seeks truth, wherever that search may lead, is a Christian. Only such a person shows true faith in God. The person who does not sincerely seek truth is not a Christian. You don’t get to be a Christian just by saying so. Frank Turek turns out not to be a Christian.

In a YouTube video I watched, an audience member suggested a possible response to the claim that postmodernism is self-contradictory. Instead of saying “all rules have exceptions,” the postmodernist can say, “all rules have exceptions—except this one.” Unfortunately, Turek simply denounced the statement as “too stupid to answer” and suggested calling the postmodernist who proposed it “poopy-pants.”

Thanks for claiming to speak in my behalf as a Christian, Frank Turek.

Let me respond, then.

The phrase “all rules have exceptions, except this one” to begin with, is not really to the point. A theist or other absolutist could assent to it; a rule can be absolute in principle and still have defined exceptions, or a defined context in which it is true. The Law of Gravity, for example, does not apply in dreams.

The real postmodern position that stands in opposition to theism is “there is no truth.” That is why they speak of “narratives,” and “my truth.” They might say instead, “truth is subjective.” Same meaning. So, rephrase the statement as “there is no truth, except this one.” If you prefer, “truth is subjective, except for this truth.”

But using “this” might be a little misleading. What is “this” in this sentence?

Try to replace it with what it refers to and you immediately get an infinite regression.

“There is no truth except that there is no truth except that there is no truth except that there is no truth…”

“Truth is subjective except for the truth that truth is subjective except for the truth that truth is subjective …”

And the statement never comes to an end. Making it logically impossible on two grounds instead of just one.

Questions from Creationists

A friend who represents herself as an atheist sent me this link on the premise that it had something to do with the question of existence of God. It does not, of course; creationism versus evolution is a very different issue.

But since she asked, it is interesting to look at some of the questions as someone who, as a Catholic, has no dog in this hunt. The questions from creationists are almost uniformly silly, but also look as if they are selected by the evolutionist for being easy to answer. Pop flies. Yet there are real issues here.

1. Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?

Truth is true regardless of one's personal preferences. To believe otherwise is to be a liar.

2. Are you scared of a divine creator?

Ad hominem. Imputing motive.

3. Is it completely illogical that the Earth was created mature? I.e., trees created with rings ... Adam created as an adult ...?

Yes, it is illogical, but the author does not address the issue. He says only that it is not plausible. He gives no basis for this claim. It is implausible because, as Descartes pointed out, such an assumption would make God a deceiver, and this is inconsistent with the nature of God.

Unfortunately, as the author is apparently not prepared to point out, non-theists are stuck on this point. For them, there is no justification to assume the one thing or the other.

4. Does not the second law of thermodynamics disprove evolution?

No; as the author states. Yawn. This would only be true if evolution were a closed system.

5. How do you explain a sunset if there is no God?

This is a valid point, which the author avoids. The question is, I presume, how can the theory of evolution explain the experience of beauty, and of beauty in nature? How does this have any survival value, and how can its survival value, if discovered, justify an experience that seems so self-validating, so meaningful in itself? It makes the theory of evolution seem trivial by comparison.

The author simply avoids the question by saying “we have evolved to appreciate colors, shapes, and metaphors.” Why? And why so profoundly? 

Then he throws in a blatant red herring/ fallacy of the false alternative by saying “understanding the science behind events adds to their beauty.” Then he covers the trail with another red herring/ad hominem by saying “incidentally, some creationists are geocentrists.”

Given all the misdirection, one can only assume he has no answer.

6. If the Big Bang Theory is true and taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?

Eh? Why is this question here? Besides being incoherent, it is, as the author points out, essentially a repetition of question four. The only purpose of including this question seems to be to obscure the point that the Big Bang theory supports the theistic hypothesis; by claiming or pretending that creationists themselves dispute it.

But then, perhaps I too am imputing motive.

7. What about noetics?

This question seems deliberately phrased so that it can be dismissed without being properly addressed. What “noetics” is is irrelevant, but the author is able to hide behind the obscurity of this term.

The underlying issue is presumably how Darwinian evolution can explain the existence of consciousness. After all, a robot ought to be able to handle stimulus-response in such a way as to maximize survival without ever being conscious or self-conscious.

The author also slips in an unjustified assertion here: “we know the mind is an effect of the brain—as many say, the mind is what the brain does.” We know no such thing. On the face of it, this assertion makes no more sense than saying “the meal is an effect of the menu; the meal is what the menu does.” Obviously the two are related in some way, but it is clearly not simple cause and effect.

Scientifically, we can in principle never know how the mind works, because science presupposes the presence of an objective observer. The observer necessarily cannot objectively observe himself. There is a necessary and unbridgeable distinction between subject and object.

This was understood as early as Heraclitus in the West, and Gautama in the East.

8. Where do you derive objective meaning in life?

This is irrelevant. Again, a thing is not true just because we find it convenient for it to be true.

9. If God did not create anything, how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?

The author surprises me by agreeing that this was not by chance. This issue of how the first single-celled organisms emerged is not a part of the Darwinian Theory of Evolution per se, but the big problem that many religious people have with the latter is its claim that mutations are random, i.e., “by chance.” If you admit that they are not, you are no longer a Darwinian. You have accepted the essential premise of Intelligent Design. The question then simply becomes whodunit.

I wonder if the author realizes this.

His final question, “who created God,” is puerile. It is part of the definition of God that he is self-existent, immortal. If he were not, he would not be God, so the question “who created God” is an immediate self-contradiction.

Why not say the same about the universe? Because the universe is simply the sum of things. If every single apple must come into existence, it is contradictory to suppose that two apples are immortal.

10. I believe in the Big Bang theory ... God said it and BANG it happened.

The author says, that's fine by science, and fine by theism. Perhaps he really is an adherent of Intelligent Design without realizing it.

11. Why do evolutionists ... reject the idea of there being a Creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extra-terrestrial sources?

As phrased, the question seems silly. The point, I presume, is that at least two well-known public evolutionists and atheists, Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, have been quite ready to entertain the thesis that life on earth is indeed an intelligent design, but by aliens rather than by God.

The author says “we don't”; but then, the author himself hints at finding the alien hypothesis at least possible.

And so again, the author seems to accept the thesis of Intelligent Design, which is supposed to be incompatible with Darwinism. He may have an argument still with Creationism, but he has ceded the argument to Intelligent Design. But then, why not take the next step? Why aliens when Occam's Razor would seem to make God the more scientifically acceptable answer as designer?

So something like this question apparently stands, and has not been answered here.

12. There is no in-between ... the only one found has been Lucy and there are only a few pieces of the hundreds necessary for an 'official proof.'

This is the oldest argument in the book. Ask the experts. Is there really a “missing link”?

13. Does metamorphosis help support evolution?

Again, this is confusing as phrased. The point is presumably that metamorphosis is a plausible alternative explanation for the data the Theory of Evolution seeks to explain. And the author seems to simply admit this.

Yet later he says evolution is fact, not just theory.

14. If Evolution is a theory ... why then is Evolution taught as a fact?

The author responds in part with a red herring: “If this question is an argument to allow creationism to be taught in schools, that's a violation of the First Amendment.” Let's suppose that statement is true (although it is really highly debatable):  it still does not answer the question.

He also asserts that evolution is “a fact and a theory.” Yes, but the fact is not the same as the theory. Evolution is a fact if by “evolution” we mean “change over time.” But that is certainly not what the creationists mean by the term. So the question remains.

Bottom line: it is thoroughly unscientific to teach the Theory of Evolution as a fact, and that is indeed what it happening now in schools (the same is true of most other school science). Moreover, teaching evolution as a fact, given that it goes against at least some parents' religious views, is itself a clear violation of the First Amendment.

15. Because [evolution] is 'theory'--not testable, observable, nor repeatable, why do you object to creationism or intelligent design being taught in schools?

The author gives a link here to an experiment any creationist would find irrelevant, because it shows nothing more than breeding, which is uncontroversial, not interspecies development. He mostly simply asserts that evolution “fits the criteria” for science. But whether it does or not is a very live debate. 

Richard Dawkins, challenged on the point that Evolution was not properly falsifiable, as a scientific hypothesis must be, claimed that it would be falsified if, say, a modern rabbit fossil appeared in an ancient rock formation.

But it turns out that this kind of fossil anomaly turns up fairly often. It is explained away in a variety of ways, all of which are superficially plausible. But that means the point stands, so far as I can tell: is Darwinian evolution really scientific? And, if not, what is the justification for not teaching other unscientific theories along with it?

16. What mechanism has science discovered that evidences an increase of genetic information seen in any genetic mutation or evolutionary process?

No idea what this is about.

17. What purpose do you think you are here for if you don't believe in salvation?

This is the same non sequitor we have seen earlier: because we want meaning in the universe does not mean there has to be meaning in the universe. 

But the author is wrong to imply, as he apparently does, that a devout Jew would have an answer very different from that of a devout Christian. All major religions believe in salvation.

18. Why have we found only one 'Lucy,' when we have found more than one of everything else?

Non sequitor. If we had found only one Lucy, it would make no material difference to the theory.

19. Can you believe in the big bang without faith?

I think the author misses the point of this question by answering “yes, we have tons of evidence for it.” I think the point is that the big bang implies the existence of God, per Aristotle, not that there is no evidence for the big bang. Again, the author seems to misrepresent or misunderstand theism as being hostile to the concept of the big bang.

20. How can you look at the world and not believe someone created/thought of it?

The author does not really address this simple statement of the argument from design. He says “it does not take very complex rules to create huge diversity.” Exactly. The fact that the physical universe can be discovered to follow a rather small set of consistent rules is another way of saying that it shows strong evidence of design. 

So--he leaves the challange unanswered.

21. Relating to the big bang theory ... where did the exploding star come from?

There was, of course, no exploding star. This badly stated question seems again to serve as a convenient red herring for the author. I presume the real question is “what caused the big bang?” That is a very good question, apparently requiring the Aristotelian thesis of a “First Mover,” and the author's answer is simply “we don't know.” He rejects a “supernatural” explanation, but what does “supernatural” mean here? If this is meant to dismiss God, it seems to me tautological: if God is involved, he is not “supernatural” in the relevant sense.

22. If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

This question makes no sense on its face. Sly to end with it, so it is the one that may stay in the reader's mind as the final statement by the opposition.

A Selection of Great Quotations

On the topic of theism and atheism.