In the wake of his debate with Dinesh D’Souza on whether or not the Christian God exists, John Loftus says that even if he didn’t win, he learned a lot. I asked him if, given his loss (as a few people see it – including Loftus I think) in this debate, he was still hoping to debate William Lane Craig, something he has wanted for a while. After all, I figured, although D’Souza is good at what he does, Craig is more qualified and experienced. John’s answer was bold enough: “I’m not afraid. I’ll debate any Christian any time. Are you game?”

For those who follow this blog, you may have just done a double take. At this blog I publicly offered to debate John Loftus, back in April 2009.  Being somewhat amused by this apparent challenge, I reminded John that he had already received such an offer from me but had not taken it up. Here’s what came next: “Glenn, what are you talking about? I have no recollection of this.”

I thought I’d do him the favour of jogging his memory. I have also pointed this out in the comments thread. Here is what transpired here in April 2009:
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On the 9th of February 2010 at the University of Illinois (Champagne-Urbana campus) Dinesh D’Souza debated John Joftus on the question “Does the Christian God Exist”?

There exists a broad consensus among those who I have read assessing the debate, whether Christian or sceptic (including John Loftus himself). I won’t tell you what that consensus is. By the time you’ve watched the debate, I won’t need to. Here’s part one of the debate. There are thirteen parts:

As you listen to this debate, bear a couple of things in mind. Firstly, D’Souza is a good presenter of arguments and I would take no credit from him. However, it’s not terribly controversial to say that he isn’t the most academically esteemed defender of Christianity out there. Someone like William Craig would take that title, and perhaps the title of the best public defender of Christianity as well. Bear in mind, in light of how you see this debate unfold, that John Loftus wants a public debate with William Lane Craig. For the sake of the Christian cause, I’d really like that to happen. But I doubt that it will. That would be like Ken Ham demanding that Richard Dawkins publicly debate him on Darwinism. It would be great for Darwinism, but it will never ever happen.

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Imagine if you will a painting hanging in a large and popular art gallery. Before considering the painting as an artwork, think of its underlying structure as a physical object. The type of basic physical object we start with determines the type of artwork that this will be. It could be a lump of clay for some pottery, or a slab of granite for a colossal statue. But this is going to be a painting. Start with a wooden box frame and a canvas stretched tightly over it and tacked in place. Now we have a base from which to begin. Without this, we could not proceed. In fact, instead of making this frame (or anything else), not proceeding at all is one of our options here too. Remember that saying you might have heard in maths at primary school (elementary school if you’re in the USA), “the empty set is a subset of every set”. In the set of our options here is the null option, the choice to  do absolutely nothing, to not make a work of art in the first place. But we did, so let’s move on.

Next, we obviously need a picture. This one is an oil painting. The painter with his paints, brushes and other tools decides what the picture will look like.

Then we have the critics – the visitors to the gallery who stand around and look at the paintings. This one is a very large painting, almost from floor to ceiling and five feet wide, so the visitors stand around the painting in a group, squinting at the many details, analysing it and commenting on its colour and depth, disagreeing about what they can see in the scene before them. Is that a llama or a chicken in the distance?

This is my analogy for the shades of different disciplines within that branch of philosophy called ethics. There are different “levels” on which we can think about ethics.
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The Electoral Finance Act 2007 was a real bone of contention when the Labour Government introduced it. The long and short of it was this: It was a way of preventing private citizens and groups from spending however much of their own money they like to encourage people to support political parties or their policies leading up to an election. The Act made it illegal for any person or group “to spend more than NZ$12,000 criticising or supporting a political party or taking a position on any political matter, or more than NZ$1,000 criticising or supporting an individual member of parliament, without first registering with a state agency, the Electoral Commission.” That registry is public information and can be read by anyone. If you spent $1,001 criticising the Prime Minister leading up to an election, her supporters, whether politicians, union bosses or common thugs (Helen Clark was Prime Minister at the time) would know who and where you were.

That alone is fundamentally wrong in a free society. But what’s worse, the Bill limited private spending to $60,000 – although this was increase by recommendation of a Select Committee to $120,000 before becoming law. It may be your money, and your opinion, but how much of it you can use was not your decision. This was a clear free speech violation.

Thankfully, the Act was repealed in March 2009.

Not so thankfully, those experts in tinkering with things until they break otherwise known as Government Ministers are at it again:

Justice Minister Simon Power has just announced changes to the laws governing campaign spending during elections, and details of next year’s referendum on the MMP electoral system.
Under the changes, people who spend more than $12,000 on parallel campaigning will have to register with the Electoral Commission. The register will be publicly available.
But unlike under the previous Electoral Finance Act, which was repealed by National last year, parallel campaigners such as unions – or the Exclusive Brethren – will not be limited to spending $120,000 during the campaign.

Is it better than the Electoral Finance Act? Yes, but let’s not get carried away. It is not generous to allow people to spend their own money expressing their political viewpoint. They should have that right without any dispute. Not limiting that right in this case simply amounts to refraining from a great injustice. But why impose any injustice at all? Why make people who want to advertise political values tell everyone else who and where they are? Not to keep them honest, for there are already laws in place against false advertisement. Why then?

What is more, “the Government has rejected proposals that would have allowed third parties to advertise on television or radio during campaigns.” Just so that you realise that this is as bad as it sounds: Private businesses and private individuals are forbidden by the government from doing business involving the expression of political values during election time.

It’s like dumping Heroin and taking up Cocaine. Arguably not as bad, but why would you?

Glenn Peoples

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A group of zealous atheists in New Zealand have been raising money to run an advertisement campaign: advertisement for – well nothing, really (quite literally). The campaign was a spinoff from an identical one in the UK where signs declaring the (probable) non-existence of God.

They’ve hit a snag. The company that the group would like to peddle its advertisements has decided that they don’t want to do so. “The company has defended the decision, saying it has the right to decline ads that it sees as controversial or divisive.” As a spokesperson for NZ Bus said,

“NZ Bus has the right to decline advertising that may, in its perception, be considered controversial or divisive,” she said.

“We have said ‘no thank you’ to Mr Fisher and have wished him well in his endeavours to secure a bus company to work with.”

Ah well, it’s a free world and we live in a free market economy. If the ads have merit, surely someone will want to promote them, right?

Somehow, this line of thinking doesn’t seem to be popular with the atheists in question, and certainly not with their spokesperson Simon Fisher. In fact, not only is this just an unfortunate reality of the free market, but it’s a violation of their human rights, the group maintains. “The group was considering taking the case to the Human Rights Review Tribunal, Mr Fisher said.”

It’s an interesting world where someone thinks they have a basic human right to the use of someone else’s advertising space to promote their beliefs. I can only wonder what these very same atheists would have said if a bus company decided not to run ads encouraging people to become Muslims – and the Muslims started talking about legal action. I’ll let your imagination run wild with the sort of descriptions that would be applied. In fact, feel free to offer your on wild speculation in the comments section!

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This is a brief comment on something that just caught my eye and jogged my memory. Every now and then someone points out that affiliation with a Christian church has declined steeply over the last half century in New Zealand. Now, I’m not the sort of myopic person to think that trends in my own neighbourhood are global indicators of anything. But my other and perhaps more interesting thought is that this shows much less than one might suppose. The nature of the relationship between Christian faith and official membership of a denomination has shifted significantly. The reality is that this generation, as opposed to that of the mid twentieth century, is much less likely to see official membership as important. This is all the more so in large evangelical or Pentecostal churches where the question of church membership might never even arise.

It was interesting to see this thought reflected in an article in the LA Times today, citing a study that illustrates the fact that a decline in church affiliation is not the result of a lack of religious conviction in young people.

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According to Martin Varsavsky, “nothing much” happens when a society gives up religion. Religion does nothing to maintain social order, does not improve standards of justice, doesn’t help people to be better citizens, and really makes no positive difference on a societal scale. He uses Spain as an example. Now, there’s a certain bias in both the selection and the comparison. Under the dictatorship of Franco, the author says, Spain was a Catholic country, but after “three decades of democracy,” this is no longer the case. It’s easy to see where a comparison like this leads. Religion = tyranny, but freedom tends away from religion. Of course any reader (hopefully) realises straight away that other examples could have been chosen that did not favour this portrayal of history. For example, in the 1930s in the Soviet Union under the atheistic state during the dictatorship of Stalin, it was very risky to be a Christian and religion was viciously suppressed, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism there, Christianity now flourishes by comparison. So of course we’ve got to be careful about how we let the writer’s selective sample sway us.

But back to the main point: Mr Varsavsky’s article is written to assure us that religion is not the backbone of a good society, and that when religion disappears, a society does not turn to chaos or fall apart or anything dreadful.
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I’ve applied for dozens and dozens of lecturing roles (all unsuccessful of course). Nearly all such applications in the USA (this tends not to be an issue elsewhere) have had a requirement along the lines of “please send a cover letter, your vitae and a statement of teaching philosophy.” I relish sending two of these things. The third just makes me cringe. I often wonder exactly what sort of “statement on teaching philosophy” someone might write that would actually make them miss out on a role.

Basically, I want to humiliate students and make them feel useless – especially women and members of ethnic minorites. Oh, and the gay ones. Especially the gay ones. I want to isolate them and make them feel like outsiders to the educational enterprise.

A key ingredient in my teaching is presentation. I want to present my material in two alternating ways. I would start by coming across as a meandering, drab mumbler, using sentences so long and jargon-laden that they would be virtually incomprehensible even if they could be properly heard. Every other week I would attempt to come across in such a way as to make students worried that I was borderline psychotic to the point where they actually feared for the personal safety.

As I see it, I am not there to help students, but rather to look and feel very very important. Very important. I see my primary relationship with my students being grounded in fear and  intimidation. If there is a way to strike enough genuine dread of me into my students that they would sooner commit suicide than fail an essay in my class for fear of being shamed in front of the group, then I want to know what it is as soon as possible.

In short, I am not there for my students. They are there for me.

OK so it wouldn’t be wise, but it would undoubtedly make much more interesting reading than the sort of drab, so-predictable-that-it’s-meaningless laundry list that search committees must almost certainly be subjected to by the truckload. I mean, who isn’t going to say that they’re into something that sounds like “collaborative learning” or an “inclusive learning environment”? As Kevin Haggert points out, you can write whatever dreamy statements you like about the sort of hippyesque learning environment you’d like to create (OK he doesn’t quite say it like that), but the fact is:

University teaching is constrained by tables bolted to classroom floors; hundreds of students in a classroom; the need to evaluate students, and for them to evaluate us; unrelenting grade escalation; official requirements to produce increasingly formal, legalistic, and binding course outlines; increasing numbers of students who also hold paying jobs; research-ethics protocols that make it more difficult for students to conduct self-directed research on topics they find personally interesting; a sense that it has become anathema to fail students; exasperating appeal procedures for students caught cheating; and the fact that teaching is only one thing for which professors are evaluated.

My approach is simple: I want to present engaging, balanced and informative lessons with style and humour – along witht he assistance of a little technology every now and then, encourage the students to ask questions and discuss issues as they arise, urge them to attend tutorials where relevant, to pursue their own reading and to own the subject, not depending on me for everything (or they will likely fail), and to foster in them an enthusiasm for what I teach them in their future studies and maybe even in their lives. But as a “statement of teaching philosophy,” that would hardly be acceptable.

Haggert’s entire article on the subject is worth a read.

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Thomas Aquinas is famous for – among other things – his five arguments for Christian theism, arguments called “the five ways” (quinque viae). The first way is the argument from the unmoved mover. The second way is the argument from the first cause (commonly called the cosmological argument). The third way is the argument from contingency and the fifth way is the argument from purpose (not from design, contra Richard Dawkins), namely the teleological argument.

What is the fourth way? In popular apologetics (and anti-apologetics) it is often referred to as the “moral argument” for God’s existence. However, if it is a moral argument, it is unlike any other moral argument you’re likely to hear. In Aquinas’ words:

The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaphysics. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

If after reading this you’re wondering “where’s the moral argument in that?” you’re not alone. I’m not faulting the argument itself in saying that. It’s an argument in its own right, it’s just not a moral argument.

The moral argument as we know it was overtly introduced into philosophy of religion by Immanuel Kant. His was an argument that sought to explain the existence of moral duty, which is what we’ve come to expect of moral arguments. Moral duties are lacking in Aquinas’ fourth way. Aquinas’ argument is a platonic argument (an argument influence by Plato). In Plato’s thought, things that exist in the world are shadows of ideal things that exist in the world of forms or ideas. For example, a thing is a good train to the extent that it resembles the train, a blueprint of the perfect train, a train existing in the world of forms. This is the form of a train. Likewise, things that have goodness in this world, the “world of sight” as Plato put it, are good to the extent that they resemble the good, the perfect form or idea of goodness in concrete form (concrete in the sense that Plato spoke of “the good” rather than the more abstract “goodness”).

What Aquinas is really arguing here is that something perfect exists. After all, he reasons, degrees of perfection exist in things around us, but if degrees of perfection exist, then something maximally perfect exists, something that all other things resemble to the extent that they exhibit perfection.

Maybe you could re-tool the argument into a moral argument along the following lines: The best people in the world are righteous, and the worst are wicked, and this is a matter of fact. But if we measure things as righteous or wicked then there must be some standard according to which we measure them, something perfectly righteous that people can either resemble or fail to resemble. And this perfectly righteous thing is God. Make no mistake, this was not Aquinas’ argument. It also would not be the best version of the moral argument, even if Aquinas had argued this way. I’m not even sure that it’s sound, but if you want a moral argument closely modelled on Aquinas’ fourth way, that’s about as good as it gets.

Glenn Peoples

NB: My opinion is subject to change without notice.

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I mentioned not long ago that I had some contact with Jim Spiegel of Taylor University. Jim kindly offered to have a copy of his new book The Making of an Atheist sent to me, and I’ll be posting a review here. I’m not alone, actually, and a number of really good blogs on Christian apologetics and related subjects will be having their say on the book too. They are as follows:

Do check these blogs out as the book does the “blog tour.”

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