Here at Wizbang, the three of us tend to have a rather laissez-faire relationship with each other. In fact, the only time I can recall all three of us working on something together was last spring’s April Fool’s prank (which every now and then raises its spectre).
Last week Paul took me to task for my piece lambasting Wal-Mart over a sewage hookup. And when confronted with what he and numerous commenters said, I reluctantly had to admit I had, indeed, been talking out of my ass. I’d built my entire piece on a single fact that had been utterly wrong. I ate so much crow I’m still coughing up feathers.
But nonetheless, I feel the need for a bit of “payback.” Earlier, Paul wrote a story about a renowned athiest who had, at the age of 81, renounced his lack of faith and found God in his twilight days. Paul speculated how this guy’s conversion would have on other non-believers. I have an answer for him.
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Oh that’s rich. You’re having me on, right? How do you propose that you be prevented from murdering someone?
For all your examples, I would defer to the power of this supposed deity. Interesting how God is always considered so powerful until it no longer fits the theists needs.
I said nothing of the sort…
Then I’m not sure what you’re getting at, as the discussion is whether God’s failure to prevent evil is evil in itself. Unless the drowning man is being used metaphorically, as I suggested, it has little application to this argument.
Huh? Knowledge requires evidence and facts.
Never said it didn’t. Not sure what you’re on about there.
You just told me that belief informs knowledge but now you agree that “belief without knowledge is irrational”?
In other words, believing something when there is a lack of evidence (or despite said lack) is irrational. It cannot be claimed as knowledge, but merely belief.
As to whether that describes every religion, would you care to produce evidence? What knowledge do you have that proves every religion to be irrational? Or is that simple belief on your part?
I’ll qualify it with “every religion to which I have been exposed.” Perhaps there is a non-faith based religion out there, but they’re keeping pretty quiet on the proof for their deity.
In Repspone to Kbiel:
>>If god is all powerful but not all good, then evil can exist. If god is all good but not all
>>powerful, then evil can exist. If god is all good and all powerful, meaning he can make evil
>>cease to exist with absolutely no effort on his part, then to do otherwise is best defined as
>>evil.
>To remove evil is to remove free will. People choose to do evil. The only way to stop people
>from choosing to do evil acts is to remove their free will.
(sigh). I told myself along time ago that if I heard this argument one more time, I would refuse to try and have a rational discussion with a theist from then on. Well, I’ve heard this tired argument a hundred times since then, and here I still sit. I suppose I still hold out for a glimmer of logic to pierce the ‘desire to believe’ the theist holds so dear. After all, I was once a YEC Fundamentalist born again Christian, so there is hope.
Let me try to put this as succinct as possible: If a god creates a humanity with free will that necessarily will result in evil, that god has performed an evil act. In other words, your answer above is what God would have already known before he created the universe (assuming he is omnipotent and omniscient). Now, you just grasped the error of your argument, but almost undoubtedly, you will make up a non-sequitur response or site a canned response that is also a non-sequitur. At least this is the response from theists I have received 99% of other times trying to get this across. The other 1% of the rare theists in that statistic are the one’s who gave it thought and said “Hm… not really sure about that”.
>>If I see a man drowning and only wave to him as he goes under, knowing full well I could
>>save him, is my lack of action good? I think most would say it was quite an evil thing to do.
>OK, lets extend your analogy. Perhaps you throw the man a life ring on a rope. If the man
>refuses to grab the life ring and drowns because of his choice to refuse your help, does that
>make you evil?
Your analogy requires the flawed premise that the promise of salvation is as obvious as a life ring when one is drowning. The better analogy is for you to be driving to work and someone rushing up to you and saying “if you keep driving, given your current route, a boulder is going to magically fall from the sky and crush your car down the road.” If you ignore this advice and get crushed by some fantastical event that is unexplained, you are hardly to blame. Second, imagine you heeded the man’s advice (took a different longer route) the first day, then the second, but after a while it became tedious.. again, if you eventually went down the road and got crushed, you could hardly be faulted for REALISTICALLY and RATIONALLY deciding to ignore the advice of the impending unlikely doom. The typical theist has a twisted sense of ‘just desserts’ and rarely assess the reasonableness of a supposed claim of doom. We are surrounded by cookoo claims of doom from other cultish religions to supposed cancer preventing diets. Ignoring them is appropriate because they lack the scientific basis to be heeded. Tens of thousands of claims of doom and gloom have been tossed aside in the past appropriately. It’s the few that happen to be correct (by accident, or by true knowledge) that humans like to point to sand say “A Ha! See??? The foolish man ignored the advice”. Humans, who like to count hits more than misses, ignore the countless times gloom was ignored and appropriately so. So even now, if a claim has no scientific basis, and in fact has a consistent amount of logical errors in it, it is appropriate to set it aside. For the theist to pretend the deliverance from said doom and gloom is as obvious as a life ring is absurd and fanciful. As well, for the theist to propose a Pascalian wager (you should believe it incase you are wrong!) is equally as absurd and fanciful for a multitude of reasons I mentioned in an earlier post.
>>As for the belief vs knowledge, yes they are related, but not the same. One can believe
>>there is no god (or believe there is a god) for no good reason; that’s not knowledge, it’s a
>>prejudice.
>Actually, that’s called idiocy. Knowledge informs belief. Belief without knowledge is
>irrational. To have knowledge without belief is to ignore the facts and escape into fantasy. To
>be without knowledge or belief is agnosticism.
We first have to define knowledge to be either “TRUTH” or “TRUTH and FALSEHOODS”. In other words, if you saw a bank robbery and you KNOW the robber had a mustache, but later a video of the robbery shows a clean shaven man (this has happened several times before in crime investigations with eye witnesses), was it still ‘knowledge’ when you really believed 100% that you saw a mustache on the guy? We’ll go with that definition as being Knowledge, whether it is true or false. Please don’t attempt to dissect that bad analogy, because given a few more minutes, I could come up with another one (illusions, false teachings, etc).
So, with that definition, KNOWLEDGE is informed by belief AND is gained neutrally. For a neutral example: You don’t CHOOSE to believe a guy next to you is wearing a green shirt, you by default KNOW he is because you perceive it directly. Then by belief: You grandfather told you he hitchhiked on a train car across the country to settle where he is now. In this example, you didn’t perceive it, and he could be lying to you, but you believe your grandfather because he isn’t one to make up mundane stuff like that. It seems reasonable to believe he is telling you the truth. So your knowledge that your grandfather hitchhiked on a train to get to his current location is based on belief.
Nonetheless, if a theist says “god exists”, he’s pretty safe because you can’t PROVE he doesn’t. But when a YEC (Young Earth Creationist) says “evolutionary theory is a sham” and “ID is science”, you can prove neither statement is true, yet, the YEC still makes these false statement to people on their webs sites and in news sound bytes that ‘evolutionary theory is a sham’ and “ID is science” and the amazing phenomenon of an actual empirical (knowable) process is ignored by these people all because of the simple WILL of a certain type of people who want to further their agenda and ignore the facts that are available right in front of them. The ID movement is proof positive that if someone wants to believe something in spite of the evidence, they will, and look you right in the eye while doing it. So I have lost a lot of hope that most theists will be able to see the evidence in front of their faces, and do exactly what IDists do which is make up stuff and point to ridiculous items that they call ‘evidence’ when it is nothing of the sort.
Well, andy, I was going to respond, but I think your nonresponses and illogic need no further illumination from me.
kbiel –
A non-response is called for when the other party begins dragging in concepts that have absolutely nothing to do with the debate at hand. I see you’re as familiar with logical fallacies as you are basic philosophy.
Have a nice day.