Here it is, the last podcast episode for 2011. This time I’m looking at “the “evil god challenge” as posed by Stephen Law in a fairly recent article by that name. Isn’t the evidence for a good God really no better or worse than the evidence that an evil god? In short, no. Here I explain why I think (as I suspect many may think) that the evil god challenges has major philosophical shortcomings, in spite of being an argument worthy of our attention.

Episode 045: What if God Were Really Bad? [ 58:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The end of the year is almost upon us, and here are my favourite blog posts for 2011. I could just list the ones that have the greatest number of actual hits (traffic wise), but that wouldn’t tell us much because some posts have been accumulating hits since January and some just started in December. So, you’re left with my favourites instead. I haven’t included any podcast episodes, and I’ve chosen no more than one from each month.

January: Deal Breakers and Christian Essentials – Although I identify as a relatively conservative Evangelical Christian, I cop a bit of flack from those who think that whatever they happen to believe counts as the boundary markers for evangelicalism, and anyone who falls outside of that is either suspect or already in the garbage chute to hell. Here I offered some reflections on the kinds of things that I think should really “make the difference” when considering another person’s point of view and whatever it’s acceptable from a Christian perspective.

February: When God attacks: Trying to make sense of God in natural disasters – Written shortly after the Earthquake that devastated Christchurch, here I offer some of my thoughts on reconciling the God revealed in Christ with the suffering we see in tragedies like this one.

March: Yeah, OK, so March was pretty average.

April: It was really hard to pick just one in April, there were a few that I like here. Maybe you should just check out the whole month. But if I’m going to pick one, I’ll pick a fairly geeky one: Does John 1:3 rule out uncreated abstract objects? – Here I offer my thoughts on William lane Craig’s claim that the idea of uncreated abstract objects is at odds with the view that God is the creator of “all things,” and that it is specifically at odds with John 1:3, contrary to the view of Peter Van Inwagen. While it’s not a hill I would die on, I side with Van Inwagen and claim that actually John 1:3 is compatible with the existence of uncreated abstract objects.

May: Richard Carrier on the Resurrection part 1 – Compiling this list has reminded me that at some point I should complete part 2 of this series! This post was the first of several that will dissect the arguments of Richard Carrier on why the doctrine of Christ’s resurrection that we know of was not the original view of the early church, and that it represents a mutated view that crept in very early in the history of the Christian faith. Like most readers, I think his arguments are considerably less than compelling.

June: An open letter to my traditionalist friends – This one is an open letter to the many evangelicals who feel that they must perpetuate the crucially important doctrine of the everlasting torments of hell, and who find themselves called to combat the rising tide of annihilationism (the view I hold). Here I offer a public explanation of why, quite frankly, they are failing and ought to fail.

July: Jesus: The Cold Case – This was a collection of my thoughts on the TV documentary in New Zealand, Jesus: The Cold Case, where, in essence, a tiny selection of theologians and New Testament scholars with views that fall well outside mainstream biblical scholarship were called on to offer the authoritative view that most of hat the Gospels say about the death of Christ is creative anti-Semitic falsehood.

August: Christian employers and the hiring process – I wrote this post at the risk of arousing animosity towards myself in the community of Christian colleges, but I thought – and still think – that this needed to be said. Christian institutions that care about excellence need to purge themselves of the nepotism that many of them are familiar with.

September: Not sure really…

October: Divine Command Ethics: Ontology versus epistemology – Here I attempt to explain a very common confusion when people criticise the idea that morality might depend on God.

November: Brief thoughts about God’s freedom to command - Sometimes (!!) I can admit when I’m wrong. Here I explain how I improved (in my view) my view on the relationship between God’s nature and divine commands.

December: The conditional premise of the moral argument – Here I say a thing or two in defence of the claim that if God did not exist, then moral facts wouldn’t exist either.

Remember folks, the blog has been here since May 2006, so there are plenty of old blog posts to browse through in the Archive over on the right.

The next podcast episode will be out during this week so you still have that to look forward to in 2011, but otherwise, I hope you’ve enjoyed another year of Say Hello to my Little Friend!

Best wishes to all

Glenn Peoples

Greetings all – For those of you who missed her Majesty’s 2011 Christmas message, here it is:

Merry Christmas everyone!

All is quiet on the blogging front at the moment, I’m taking a few days’ rest and recuperation (long story), but there will be a new podcast within the week.

Whatever you’re doing, have a safe and happy Christmas. Enjoy yourself, spend time with people you love, and to those of us who appreciate what Christmas is all about, make sure that the main thing remains the main thing. Christ is at the centre of Christmas.

It’s bad taste to say unpleasant things about people when they’re dead. Well, no it’s not actually. Kim Jon Il just died and just today they were mocking him on the radio. Wartime songs were sung about Hitler after his demise, and so on. But in polite society, it’s not done. Christopher Hitchens lost his battle with Cancer recently, and Christians are coming out of the woodwork to say nice things about him.

He may have been a good journalist and writer, but in the arena he became notorious in – attacking religion, he was a prat, and deliberately so. And not just a prat, a pretending, smug, arrogant (certainly more arrogant than was warranted by his ignorance), belligerent prat. He – along with his equally vapid adoring fan base – was quite taken by the idea that you’ve offered a sensible critique of Christianity if you just describe it in scornful terms with a serious look on your face, or that a deep Oxford educated voice and some dirty innuendos made a point all that more logically compelling.

Christopher Hitchens, aside from having a presenter’s (and a writer’s) flair, contributed nothing of value to public discussions around religion. His circus antics only served to egg on the very worst intellectual element of atheism (frankly giving more respectable non-believers a bad name), and to undermine the academic virtues of his Alma Mater (the University of Oxford). In spite of – as far as actual arguments go – hands down losing his debate with Alister McGrath on the value of religion, the fact that he made his comments in a sassy tone and threw in a questionable joke or two warmed people to him, turning them away from analysing the intellectual merits of what was said and towards an analysis of “who gave the best burn.” In this he certainly resembles his company among the so-called “four horsemen” of the new atheism, especially Richard Dawkins, whose ostensible tribute to Hitchens is essentially a slightly less well written version of a Hitchens tirade against theism. Dawkins would have us think that Hitchens’ death shows us the dignity of atheism. No it doesn’t. It shows us what’s wrong with smoking and drinking to excess. Hitchens took the advice of Job’s wife, “curse your God and die.”

Hitchens left a lasting message for his adorers: Screw reason, just go for the shock value of a thumped podium, fake outrage, showmanship and some naughty words. It’s not much of a legacy. That said, he was a man who certainly spoke what he believed and had integrity that would allow him to do nothing else. This being the case, the last thing he would want, I am sure, is a pretentious tribute about what a sad loss of a great fellow this is. It’s sad for him, his friends and family of course, and they have my condolences for the personal loss. But as for this “here lies a worthy opponent” nonsense, forget it. He lived as a fool, played to the lowest common denominator, encouraged a generation of sloppy, angry argument makers and committed his career and a good chunk of his life to hostility towards his maker. His life was one of genuine tragedy.

Glenn Peoples

The title of this blog entry is a little misleading, since I’m actually talking about a conditional premise of one formulation of the moral argument. It’s not the five-step formulation of the moral argument that I prefer to use, but it’s a common one nonetheless, and one that I do think is sound.

The common formulation that I have in mind is this:

1. If God did not exist, then there could not be any objective moral duties and values
2. There are objective moral duties and values
3. Therefore God exists

This formulation is the one that most have in mind when they think of the moral argument. In a recent radio discussion I outlined my own formulation of the argument (see the above link), only to have my argument immediately re-described back to me using the above formulation (not I that I minded too much, as the above formulation is simpler and probably more appropriate for the radio discussion format). Such is the familiarity of this form of the moral argument in the minds of many.

The logic is flawless, there’s no doubting that. This is a valid argument – the conclusion follows inevitably from the premises. The only way to show that the conclusion is false, therefore, is to show that one of the premises is false. Usually when this argument is presented, those who take issue with it reject the first premise, which is a conditional premise (as it takes the form of “If… then…”). Most often when the argument is presented in a public forum the objection comes in the form of a misunderstanding along the lines of “Wait, do you really think atheists aren’t moral – that we can’t do good?” This is an objection that came up when I last presented the moral argument to a group of Students at the University of Auckland. This objection clearly misses the mark, since the argument has little if anything to do with how moral or immoral specific groups of people might happen to be. It’s about how moral facts can exist at all – about whether any actions might be objectively morally right or wrong, whether they are carried out by Christians, Taoists, Muslims, Jews or atheists. But another common rebuff that I hear is “Oh come on, that old canard? Seriously? That claim is so common but nobody EVER gives any reasons for thinking that it’s true!” In nearly every case I just ask the person who said that how many philosophical defences of the moral argument they have read. Plenty, I’m told – they’ve discussed in on the internet quite a few times! One (but only one) person has actually told me that they’ve listened to Bill Craig’s presentation of the moral argument and also read his summary of that argument in Reasonable Faith and they still say that he actually didn’t offer any considerations, but that claim is fairly unique (I don’t think any fair reader can say that Bill has actually offered no serious considerations at all in any of his books or public debates).

So what kind of considerations do philosophers offer for the first premise? Here’s where I get a bit preachy and vent a concern that I have with the way some blog readers (mostly not readers of this blog, of course) approach the acquisition of understanding. If you want a full, satisfying answer to this (or any other complex) question, you shouldn’t be reading a popular level blog entry to get it. A number of philosophers of religion have defended the first premise. Indeed nearly all Christian philosophers I am aware of who have commented on that premise maintain that it is true, so there is no shortage of places to look. You could start with the fairly popular level treatments by philosopher William Lane Craig (who touches fairly briefly on the issue in his book Reasonable Faith (or perhaps the somewhat simpler On Guard and has discussed the issue at more length with Richard Taylor in their debate “Is the basis of Morality natural or Supernatural?” Other popular level works that offer some considerations in favour of this premise include C. Stephen Evans, Philosophy of Religion: Thinking About Faith or (getting more detailed) Paul Copan’s chapter on the moral argument in the book he edited with Paul Moser, The Rationality of Theism. If you’re interested in really delving into the moral argument and the relationship between God and morality in more depth in a book length treatment, something like John Hare’s God and Morality: A Philosophical History, John Rist’s Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality or Robert Adams’ magisterial work Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics may be more your cup of tea. The point is just that if you’re someone who rolls their eyes at the conditional premise here as though it’s a nonsensical alien idea for which you’ve just never heard any serious arguments before, then here’s some advice: the comment section of a blog is not the place to obtain an education in meta-ethics or philosophy of religion. I mean sure, via blogs and podcasts you can access some really useful reading and listening material and learn a lot, but there is no substitute for your own earnest research, and nothing can lift the burden of the responsibility of putting in the hours, days, weeks (etc) of learning the subject for yourself if you are someone who really wants to be able to speak as an insider on the subject. I spent a couple of lengthy chapters in a doctoral dissertation laying some of the groundwork for and defending a moral argument for theism, but even then there was plenty more that could have been said. So when I see someone say that they’ve just never seen any serious reasons (even reasons that they have considered and ultimately rejected) offered for the conditional premise of the moral argument, my answer is just that they need to do some reading. I have never encountered a good argument for why I should hold any particular belief about microscopic creatures that live on the sea floor, but that’s just because I’ve never bothered to spend much time reading about deep sea marine biology. It’s my own fault!

But let’s imagine that the following scenario is true: You don’t have time to do a lot of reading of academic books (or maybe you just don’t like it). You haven’t done a lot of reading in philosophy of religion or meta-ethics, and as a result, you (naturally) have no intentions of presenting yourself as someone who presumes to speak on God and morality with any kind of authority. You’re realistic about this. You’re just curious as to what kind of considerations philosophers have given for something like the conditional premise given here, and although you realise that a blog may not be the place to get the full story, you’re happy with a condensed version.

Interested? Read the rest.

I’m a moral realist. That means that I think there really are some moral facts. It is wrong to do some things, and it is right to do some things, and this isn’t just a vent of emotion or an expression of my will, it’s really true. Stephen Law is also a moral realist, but if I’m reading him rightly in his debate with William Lane Craig on the existence of God or in his more recent discussion with me on the Unbelievable radio show where I discussed the moral argument for theism, he’d sooner give up moral realism than accept theism.

An argument I sketched in that discussion was that the best way to explain moral facts is by reference to God. Although he does currently believe in moral facts, he noted that they may not be there after all, so maybe there’s no reason to invoke God as an explanation. After all, he said, we can come up with an evolutionary explanation of why we would believe in moral facts whether they really existed or not. Law wants to be careful here. At the time I raised the concern that this may just be a case of the genetic fallacy, offering an explanation of where a belief came from as though this showed or suggested that the belief is false. But this isn’t what Law means to say, he replied. The point is not that the existence of an evolutionary account of why moral beliefs exist shows that those beliefs are false. That would indeed be the genetic fallacy at work. No, the point is that whether those beliefs are true or false, there exists the same evolutionary account for why we hold them – and that account is unaffected by their truth or falsehood. There is thus no particular reason to think that the evolutionary processes that brought them into being is likely to produce true-belief forming processes.

While this line of argument does not purport to show that the moral beliefs we hold aren’t true, it’s meant to cast doubt on the probability that the process that gave rise to these beliefs (or at least the process that gave rise to the relevant belief forming processes) is likely to result in either true beliefs or reliable belief forming faculties. It’s best to think in terms of the latter, if only because it’s downright bizarre to think that evolution forms beliefs. It plainly doesn’t, but it does form mechanisms or processes that creatures use to form beliefs.

So what should we make of this? Can we give an evolutionary account of why we would believe in moral facts, an account that is blind to the actual existence of those facts? Secondly, if we could give an account like this, would it undermine the probability that the processes that form those beliefs are reliable? I will give two answers: Yes, it is trivially true that we can give an account like this, and no, the fact that we can do so should not undermine our confidence in the belief form process that forms moral beliefs. In doing so I will be drawing on an argument by Alvin Plantinga, namely the “evolutionary argument against naturalism.” While I am inclined to think that argument is unsound, many of the insights that it draws attention to are true nonetheless.
Interested? Read the rest.

The offices of Beretta and Say Hello to my Little Friend are about to undergo relocation. All office staff and volunteers will be off for the next week or so, our sound engineers will be taking a break, all equipment is being moved and the entire organisation is getting a change of scenery.

Yeah, I’m moving house, so the blog will be pretty quiet while we pack and stuff.