CalvinDude.com

HT: Patrick Chan

According to this article, Steve Jobs was “a skeptic all his life.” Furthermore:

The book delves into Jobs’ decision to delay surgery for nine months after learning in October 2003 that he had a neuroendocrine tumor — a relatively rare type of pancreatic cancer that normally grows more slowly and is therefore more treatable.

Instead, he tried a vegan diet, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments he found online, and even consulted a psychic. He also was influenced by a doctor who ran a clinic that advised juice fasts, bowel cleansings and other unproven approaches, the book says, before finally having surgery in July 2004.

What a rather odd definition of “skeptic.”

On Facebook, Bnonn Tennant from the Thinking Matters website asked “Is it unreasonable to believe that God created a 14 billion year old universe a few thousand years ago?” Obviously, one can quibble about the terminology used in the question, but I take it to mean something similar to “Is it unreasonable to believe that God created a man who appeared to be, say, twenty years old (Adam) who was really only created that instant?” Substitute the entire universe for the man and fourteen billion years for the age and you’ve got the same problem.

Now, since this was on Facebook, I won’t put the name of one of the people who responded, but the question was asked in response: “Would this make God a deciever [sic] though?” I always find this question interesting, because it presumes that when God was creating the world, He must have considered all our future inferences about how to measure the age of the universe and then specifically set out to make up a false history in order to trick us in some manner. It never occurs to people who ask this question that maybe God didn’t concern Himself at all with our inferences but instead had completely different reasons for having the Earth “look” old.

I put “look” in quotes above precisely because the apparent age of an object has no bearing on its actual age. Consider the Tower of Terror ride at Disney California Adventure. It’s modeled after a 1930s look and is covered with fake cobwebs and dust to give the appearance that the hotel is old and decrepit, but it actually opened at DCA in 2004. Does anyone think that such a design qualifies as a deception on the part of Disney? No, for we recognize this as an aesthetic choice Disney made that’s intended to make a ride more enjoyable so that people will be more willing to part with their money to ride it.

Now, if human beings can make something with the appearance of age without it being deceptive, why then would we rule out the ability for God to do so?

In closing, I merely point out that I take no stance on the age of the universe at all. I believe time is meaningless without a temporal observer to experience it, so it’s really pointless to speak of any time before Adam was created in the first place.

John Loftus once assured us that part of the proof there is no God is that bird-men do not exist.

I think this proves beyond all doubt that the non-existence of bird men proves the existence of God…

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO — Protests erupted today in the ultra-conservative city of Colorado Springs, CO as thousands lined the streets to protest James Frey’s new book, available on Good Friday.

Frey’s book sparked controversy when he decided to write a biographical account of a man smoking pot and sleeping with prostitutes. The problem, Christians say, is when Frey decided to portray his biography as if he were the Messiah.

“This outrage is outrageous,” said one protestor, after he fired shots into several businesses along the I-25 corridor from the back of his moped. No one was injured in the exchange.

The scene is reminiscent of the riots of March 2, 2007, when four people were seen being slightly miffed at James Cameron.

The Associated Press contributed nothing to this report.

New Atheists like to put on a front they pretend heroic,
To pat one on the back, and call the other a stoic
But in this world they built from visions so myopic
One sad event exposes all they made as mere sophomoric.

For you see the castles they have built are sculpted hypocrisy
Denying all eternity in pursuit of expediency.
Yet when push comes to shove you’ll find interdependency
Between their claims and the morals they identify as deviancy.

For lo!, when things are looking up, the atheist is quite sure
That morals are delusions, tricks to make you feel secure.
But in reality there is nothing at all that is impure
(If there’s one thing that is certain, on this they’re not demure!)

They fight against all claims of virtue, any standards of behavior.
“We are good for goodness sake; we need not your Savior.”
They’ll do it all their own way, saying “We’ll keep that for which we labor.
While we tend to our own needs, you go grovel for your neighbor.”

They claim morality is a lie, a deceit of evolution’s wheel.
It’s nothing but serendipity, a matter of how you feel.
There’s no standard, it’s all relative, and it’s best that you steel
Yourself rather than bend the knee and kneel.

Yet let just one of them kick the bucket and they become the greatest moralists!
Telling you what you dare not say, they’re always there to assist
And order you to “shut up, shut up!”—and how they do persist
With a zeal that makes up for all the times their morals have been missed!

Let the one who died be a champion striving for non-faith
And suddenly they all realize that nowhere for them is safe;
So lashing out like little kids, they attack and they strafe
Their own troops they’ve put forth, like some evil haunted wraith.

For suddenly they’ve discovered laws that apply to you and me.
No longer are they opinion. No! They’re dogma, can’t you see?
You must submit to their demands, it is a moral decree
That one not inform the atheists of their fate in eternity.

For that would be too insensitive—wait for the corpse to cool
And give them time to forget how they live but as a tool
To the bleakness of a future built without sanity’s rule.
Truly, the more they whine and cry, the more they play the fool.

So take these hypocrites away, be done with them at last.
They played loose and free, and it ended in a blast.
And now they’re left with a mess to clean in the filth that they’ve amassed
In a wasted life spent in their own void, so infinite and vast.

Preach not to me, you atheist, you lying hypocrite
Who now deigns to condemn all that you would so easily permit
Were it not for but just one man whose body merely quit.
Such is your “virtue”, and we all know, that it is not legit.

Some people claim that 2 + 2 = 4 in base 10 math. But think about this for a moment. Someone could claim that 2 + 2 = 5. Or that 2 + 2 = 7,380,934. Now here’s the thing about that. Those people who would say the answer to 2 + 2 is some particular answer or another are typically those people who fit into a certain demographic (i.e., those who come up with counterarguments to poor reasoning may be culturally biased toward stating 2 + 2 = 5). So we can use the OTF to examine whether it is right in treating any answer to 2 + 2 as valid.

Now there are essentially an infinite number of answers you could claim satisfy 2 + 2. Yet certain mathematicians will insist that 2 + 2 = 4 in all cases in base 10 math. Even facing the OTF, they insist their answer could be the only correct one.

Fine. I understand this and I grant it. Even though their particular brand of mathematical solution has a low probability to it they could still have the correct answer after all. At this point though, they are talking about possibilities. Their answer could still be true even though the odds are their answer is wrong. This is sort of like winning the lottery when there are an infinite number of mathematical tickets to draw out of a barrel. The odds are 1 in infinity but that doesn’t give any one of them pause. Even if we pare the possible solutions down to positive whole numbers, acknowledging the rest are negatives or fractions or even irrational numbers, this still doesn’t change much of anything, nor would it give them any pause. Why? Because they have done a dance that I now call The Delusional Sidestep (TDS). Since the consequences of the demographic data are quickly recognized by them to require the OTF they make a quick sidestep to avoid it by claiming they could still be right despite the odds. Wait just a minute!? What about the odds? Ahhh, just ignore them we’re told. There is nothing to see here. Move along. We prefer our delusion to the actual probabilities.

Remember, it doesn’t matter that someone can provide actual reasons why one answer is valid and another isn’t. WE MUST NOT IGNORE THE ODDS! Why, any statistician would agree with me here. What are the odds the Roman Empire was located in present-day Italy? Well, there are 195 countries in the world now, so the answer is 1 in 195. Obviously, therefore, it is not at all likely that the Roman Empire was located in present-day Italy. What are the odds that Obama is president of the United States? Well, the population of the United States is 307,006,550, so the answer is 1 in 307,006,550. Obviously, therefore, it is not at all likely that Obama is president of the United States.

It’s obvious to any intelligent person that there are far more ways for a factual question to be answered incorrectly than correctly, and therefore the odds that any particular answer is actually true is quite low. Therefore, if you make a factual claim, the OTF says you’re talking bunk so I don’t have to listen to a single thing you say. Only a non-scholar could possibly disagree with my brilliance.

“…this book will destroy Christianity.”

Those words by atheist Michael Martin are located in the blurb he wrote that appears on the back cover of The Christian Delusion, edited by John Loftus (speaking of back cover blurbs, Dale C. Allison, Jr. starts his blurb by instructing us to “Forget Dawkins” and that’s sage advice no matter who gives it). Furthermore, Keith Parsons states of The Christian Delusion that “there can have been few works as effective” at debunking Christianity. Ken Pulliam states: “It demonstrates that those who believe in the tenets of evangelical Christianity truly are deluded.”

The book contains chapters written by a wide range of modern atheists, including Hector Avalos, Richard Carrier, and Edward T. Babinski[*]. (If those names sound familiar it’s because we’ve engaged with each of them many times on Triablogue.) Of his contribution to the book, Carrier slapped both of his chapters with a “tour de force” label and confidently assured us, “I doubt I’ll ever have to write another [refutation of the resurrection].” He says: “My debunking of [Christian claims on science] is so decisive in this chapter, you won’t need to refer anyone anywhere else.”

But such hubris vastly overreaches reality, and Triablogue is here to demonstrate it with The Infidel Delusion.

The Infidel Delusion was written (in alphabetical order) by Patrick Chan, Jason Engwer, Steve Hays, and Paul Manata. This is a true tour de force. By the time I got to Manata’s debunking of Valerie Tarico’s naturalistic reductionism in chapter two, the perfect metaphor had formed in my head: Collectively, these Triabloggian authors were firing intellectual howitzer shells point-blank into a cardboard shanty town.

Each chapter of The Christian Delusion is thoroughly debunked by Hay’s philosophical and theological acumen, Engwer’s encyclopedic knowledge of history, Chan’s medical training, and/or Manata’s philosophical prowess. Contrary to the tactic The Christian Delusion used—to attack the weakest arguments put forth in the name of Christianity—the authors of The Infidel Delusion dismantled the strongest arguments atheists had to offer. Indeed, if there truly are “few works as effective” as The Christian Delusion, as Parsons claimed, then Triablogue shows atheism to be in a sad state indeed.

A Quick Overview of What’s in The Infidel Delusion
After introductions from Hays, Engwer, and Manata, the debunking of The Christian Delusion begins. In chapter one, Eller’s entire premise is shown to be at odds with the rest of The Christian Delusion, making that book internally incoherent. Eller’s belief that there is no real Christianity, but instead thousands of Christianities, actually destroys the basis for The Christian Delusion by rendering the idea that there is such a thing as Christianity (singular) to refute moot. If atheists are to be consistent, either Eller’s contribution must go or it must stand alone.

Chapter two shows Tarico’s cognitive research to be nowhere near adequate to explain what she thinks it explains. In addition to being self-refuting, Manata makes an excellent case that Tarico doesn’t even understand the issues involved in naturalism and scientific reductionism. Additionally, Chan includes a great deal on the medical issues involved, including debunking the idea that Paul’s vision of Christ on the Road to Damascus could be explained by a frontal lobe seizure.

Chapter three deals with Long’s attempt to show cultural background determines how one will believe. This sort of cultural relativism is a double-edged sword, however. If it works against Christianity, it is only at the expense of destroying atheism in the process.

Chapter four gets us to the heart of The Christian Delusion, the Outsider Test for Faith that forms the key of Loftus’s atheistic apologetic. Hays demonstrates how Loftus doesn’t consistently apply this test since it equally destroys his own view. Engwer shows that the attitude Loftus has about how beliefs are formed doesn’t cohere to Christian experience. And finally, Manata demonstrates that the outsider test is “vague, ambiguous, invalid, unsound, superfluous, informally fallacious, and subject to a defeater-deflector.”

Chapter five reviews Babinski’s flawed view of Jewish cosmology based on uncharitable assumptions about the stupidity of ancient people and their lack of ability to understand figurative language; chapter six shows Tobin’s repeating of common objections to Scripture (creating “dilemma” by ignoring all conservative scholarship, and even most liberal scholarship); and chapter seven refutes Loftus’s claim that Scripture is unclear, ironically in part by showing that if Loftus’s chapter is true, Babinski’s and Tobin’s must be false! But internal consistency is not something The Christian Delusion was concerned with.

Chapter eight deals with Avalos’s claims that Yahweh is a “moral monster.” Yet this once again requires us to reject Loftus’s chapter seven, and furthermore Avalos’s moral relativism defeats his own argument.

Chapter nine deals with concepts of animal suffering as evidence for the non-existence of God. Amongst other arguments, Hays deftly shows how Loftus’s claims are unsupported anthropomorphisms, while Engwer focuses on the ludicrous demands Loftus requires of believers to “answer” this “problem” and Manata shows Loftus’s argument is really nothing short of wishful thinking completely divorced from the Christian theology it was supposed to debunk.

Chapter ten reviews Price’s misuse of methodological naturalism, including the fact that Price actually ignores the vast majority of modern scholarship in rejecting the very existence of Jesus as a historical figure. Chapter eleven examines similar weaknesses of methodology in the claims Carrier makes regarding the resurrection.

Chapter twelve examines Loftus’s poor exegetical skills and his inability to understand even simple Biblical passages in context. In critiquing Christian prophecy, Loftus manages to all but ignore the preterist movement and makes some rather basic label errors on the positions he does look at.

Chapter thirteen deals with Eller’s moral claims, especially in light of his rejection of objective morality. The Infidel Delusion shows how his evolutionary claims are insufficient to create any type of morality.

Chapter fourteen shows that Avalos’s argument that atheism didn’t cause the Holocaust is irrelevant to the issue of whether Christianity is true. Finally, chapter fifteen shows that Carrier’s historical claims that Christians are not responsible for modern science is both irrelevant to the issue of the truth of Christianity as well as focused on the wrong issues, even within the context of his argument.

The last section of The Infidel Delusion consists of ten appendices that give us more detail into some of the arguments presented within the various chapters, as well as a look at some of the specific claims made by contributors to The Christian Delusion outside of the scope of that actual book.

Conclusion
The Infidel Delusion debunks the entirety of The Christian Delusion. This is not to say it addresses every single flaw in The Christian Delusion—such would take multiple volumes. But there is no major claim made in The Christian Delusion that withstands the criticism leveled at it in The Infidel Delusion. As Steve Hays wrote in his introduction, “…if The Christian Delusion turns out to be just another white elephant in the overcrowded zoo of militant atheism, then that‘s a vindication of the Christian faith.”

The Infidel Delusion certainly demonstrates this.

Full disclosure: While I did not contribute any writing to The Infidel Delusion, I did edit, collate, and format the ebook.

UPDATE:
[*] To be fair, Babinski classifies himself as an agnostic.

It’s nice to do nothing. Not that “nothing” is precisely what I’ve been doing; but rather, compared to my normal day, this is like doing nothing. I slept in, got up, read a bit of Calvin’s commentary on Jeremiah, listened to a sermon by Mark Driscoll (for reasons which may, or may not, become apparent later), worked a bit on a novel (for Travis’s edification, it was Memorial Stone, which is roughly 40% complete right now—I’ll get back to editing The 13th Prime sometime this week too), and then played Guitar Hero for a bit. Normally, I would have gotten up not so late, rode the bus into town, hit on a girl at the local café (or, if no femmes present, talked about Lost with the guys there), then gone to work, deleted spam, and yell at the scanner machine while sighing about the abysmal reading comprehension skills inherent in both field and service center staff, yelled at the machine some more because of how it always breaks and jams, yelled the design of our new forms which jam more often than our old forms, yelled a bit more at the machine, then gone to lunch, after which I would have repeated everything again.

It’s amazing that my day of “nothing” is so much more fruitful than my typical day. Ahhhhhhh.

BTW, don’t get me wrong. On the whole, I like my job (or I wouldn’t have been there for 14 years and counting). But there’s a reason we get vacations. It’s actually a Biblical reason, and has to do with the same reason that we get weekends. If for no other reason, atheists should be down on their knees thanking God He insisted on Sabbaths.

Several years ago, I heard a caller to a talk radio show make the claim that he could prove God doesn’t exist. Since I am a Christian apologist in my spare time, I wanted to see what this amazing proof of the non-existence of God was (despite the fact that it is impossible to prove a negative).

The caller said that God couldn’t exist because, in his words, “crap exists.” He did not mean this euphemistically, as a reference to bad things—although that might have been a better argument for him. Instead, he meant “fecal matter.” He later also said that a woman’s period proves God does not exist.

This kind of “proof” is enough to make any thinking person go, “Huh?” After all, it would be sorta like saying that unicorns don’t exist because horses have to wear horseshoes. In other words, even if God does not exist, the argument is a non-sequitur. It’s also a bogus argument because, in order for it to be valid, the definition of God would need to include “a being who would not create people that produced fecal matter or had monthly periods”—a definition of God that would be quite unique, to say the least.

There is also the assumption the atheist makes about what the nature of God is. How does the atheist know that God would not do something? It is certainly logically possible for God to design people who give off waste products. So why would this be a problem prima face?

But there is more.

This argument also assumes the purpose for which God would design something. People don’t like dealing with fecal matter because it’s nasty and smelly and unpleasant for us, but that doesn’t mean that fecal matter serves no purpose at all. After all, millions of bacteria live in it. Who’s to say that God wouldn’t have designed people to produce waste material because He had in mind another creation that would benefit from it? It is only if we assume that God’s entire purpose is for the atheist’s comfort that we could accept this argument.

This argument, therefore, is easily dispatched. It is surprising, however, to see how many atheists use variations of this same argument. It goes like this: “God wouldn’t do X, therefore He doesn’t exist.” X can be anything the atheist wants to argue.

But even if an atheist could come up with something else that we can perceive no practical value for, how would that disprove God? Just because you would not design something a certain way does not mean that God would not do so. And therefore, just because something is not the way you would have made it does not mean that God does not exist.

This would be like saying, “If I were to design a computer operating system, I would make it so it wouldn’t crash every fifteen minutes. Windows crashes every fifteen minutes. Therefore, no one designed it.”

While Apple computer aficionados will agree with this just out of spite for Microsoft, it is most certainly the case that Windows was designed by the people at Microsoft. And just because it doesn’t work the way you would have made it does not make the programmers non-existent.

Some may yet take this argument a bit further. For example, some may say the evidence of Windows proves that programmers make mistakes. Therefore, people make mistakes. But a perfect God would not make mistakes. Since God created people who make mistakes, God created a mistake. Therefore, God does not exist.

Can you see how this is the same argument as before? “God would not do X, therefore He does not exist.” Or, “God would not create flawed people, therefore He does not exist.”

This argument has the same problems as the previous one. It assumes both the nature of God (that God, qua God, cannot create flawed people) and the intention for which people are created (that the purpose of God creating people was to make them flawless). Furthermore, this assumes a definition of perfection and automatically defines flawed people as outside of it.

But if God designed the world to have flawed people such that He might demonstrate His mercy and power toward them, then their very flaws are in fact the means for God doing so. And thus, those flaws are not an imperfection in God’s plan. Flawed people may very well fit perfectly into God’s plan.

It is only when you think of God in an anthropocentric manner that you would see any problems arise. But God exists theocentrically, not anthropocentrically. And God’s plans are not just for people, but ultimately for Himself.

With that in mind, it is obvious that the atheist’s entire line of argument cannot stand unless the atheist himself is God. For all he has proven is that the atheist would not do X, therefore the atheist did not create the world.

A conclusion not in dispute.