On the Internet, I have encountered a prominent Philosopher of Religion called Alvin Plantinga who was once described by Time Magazine as a America’s leading orthodoxist Protestant Philosopher of God. He has made many anti-naturalistic arguments and theistic arguments in the past, has engaged in Public Discourse with atheists, rather like William Lane Craig. And also, William Lane Craig seems to be a fan of Plantinga’s misguided “Reformed Epistemology”. But that’s another story altogether. In our particular case, I intend to refute the various fallacious absurdities of Alvin Plantinga’s ”Evolutionary Argument Against [Metaphysical] Naturalism”. Or rather more specifically, I will be critiquing all six parts together of a six-part series of lectures on YouTube. It is a talk by Plantinga entitled “An Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism”. –see here. I may not be able to address every point as meticulously as I would like to, but I will give it a fair shot. Of course, it is doubtful that he has not simply ignored these criticisms if they have already been made in the past. Oh well… also, for expediency, here is an overview of Plantinga from Wikipedia. You will notice that like William Lane Craig, he is a Christian apologist, and has authored such books as God and Other Minds, and has even written a book entirely dedicated to the argument he presents in this 60 minute lecture. :)
- Introduce Yourself! • Re: Rustling in. Sun Feb 05, 2012 1:09 am australopithecus
- Introduce Yourself! • Re: Heard AronRa, came here, he gave me the finger... Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:48 am Inzl Kett
- Introduce Yourself! • Re: Rustling in. Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:46 am Inzl Kett
- Religion & Irreligion • Re: Christians being offended by their own beliefs Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:37 am australopithecus
- Religion & Irreligion • Re: Christians being offended by their own beliefs Sun Feb 05, 2012 12:35 am Inzl Kett
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- December 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- Astronomy (5)
- Censorship (33)
- Culture (25)
- Entertainment (15)
- Events (13)
- History (5)
- Introductions (10)
- Literature (11)
- News (57)
- Philosophy (45)
- Politics (7)
- Random (14)
- Reason (66)
- Religion (59)
- Research (8)
- Reviews (2)
- Science (53)
- Show (5)
- TubeGuardian (2)
- Uncategorized (1)
- Website (6)
- YouTube (32)
Archive for the ‘Reason’ Category
Critique Of Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism
Ray Comfort is 180 degrees from reality
Ok so i had a really good laugh today. I decided that a watching of Ray Comfort’s “180 movie” would be a good way to waste 33 mins of my life. The best synopsis of the contents of the film at present can be found on RationalWiki. But i can boil it down to two arguments Ray presents:
1) Hitler is Anti-christian.
2) Abortion in America is really akin to the Holocaust.
The second argument is really little more than the application of godwins law into a debate, furthermore the connection between abortion doctors in America today and the Nazis in the 1930′s and 1940′s is more silly and superficial than what Ray and his fellow religious propagandists make it out to be. Yes it is true that the Nazis used forced abortions upon women deemed “unAryan” (women who were Jewish or Slavic, etc.) in order to decrease their number as part of their eugenic policies, however for healthy Women of the Volksgemeinschaft it was a different story, because for them abortions were banned. Indeed in 1936, Heinrich Himmler created a Reich Central Office just for the purpose “for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion”! You know those two things Ray and his fellow religious fundamentalists don’t like. Being sarcastic here like i sometimes am, Does this mean that by ray’s logic he may be *shock horror* akin to a Nazi? In the real world, of course he isn’t!
But for the purposes of this, im going to attempt to rebut his other argument, that Hitler was no Christian.
Dark ages, Science and Christianity.
Here’s one of those little gems that i do occasionaly come across myself and sometimes in the Chat which i frequently visit, That Europe from the moment Rome collapsed (often interpreted as being around the year 500 AD although in my country the Romans left circa 410 AD) went into some “Dark age” an age that ended circa 1500. A further picture of this time is the notion that it was the religious element of this apparant “1000 yr dark age” that really stifled human progress. I take it many of you may have heard the joke going around that without this religious element to this apparant “1000yr dark age”, It would have ended so much sooner and Humanity would be freely colonizing the other planets by now. In picture form, it looks a little something like this
But what a false picture this is!
Magnetic Madness
Recently my Dad was diagnosed as having arthritis in his knees. Now I should say right from the beginning that I am skeptical even of this, given that the diagnosis apparently just involved my Dad telling the GP that his knees still hurt after a fall he had a few weeks ago, the GP looking at my Dad’s trousers for a few seconds (he never so much as asked him to roll up his trouser leg) and then noting the fact that my Dad is over 60 and so concluding that the pain is therefore the result of arthritic knees. But I am not going to focus on this aspect of the story as it is what happened next that really got my skeptical juices flowing.
I have a few Questions about arguing with idiots
Ladies and Gentlemen: Let me introduce you to “Onefodderunit” [I'll call him OFU for short]. He is by far and away the most Batshit crazy person i and my friends have ever had the displeasure of arguing with [the debate in the comments section of the video]. He’s a 9/11 truther. He’s a Creationist who regards atheism [and presumably Darwin's ideas] itself as a “belief in Coincidental Chemical Creationism.” [Im not kidding] even though he also claims “Im not religious”. He’s a Holocaust denier. He regards the Nazis as Socialist [A silly piece of anti intelectual history revisionism in and of itself that i can deal with] and clearly regards himself given his “Anti left” rhetoric as something of a right winger. I regard him as a Neo-Nazi lunatic due to the clear and deep anti-semitism he displays though he denies he is a Neo-Nazi. Well at least to me he proves his type belong on the Far Right.
But in Short, He’s all my Nightmares wrapped up in one disgusting cowardly person who’se level of insanity approaches and possibly exceeds that of a “Nephilimfree” or “VenomFangX”
Hey if everyone is doing it then why not?
As I am sure you have already heard the Pope has once again been offering up reasons why the sexual abuse of children by an alarmingly large number of Catholic priests isn’t all that bad after all. This time he has gone for the “Well they did it first” defence.
In his Christmas speech the Pope addressed the subject of child abuse by saying that “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children”. Yup, apparently in the 1970 everyone was just fine and dandy with the sexual abuse of children and so the Catholic Church, I’m guessing in an attempt to try and seem relevant and keep with the times, decided to start abusing children as well. See, it is all the secular worlds fault, they did it first, the Catholic Church was just going with the crowd. Seriously Catholic Church, if the secular world jumped off a bridge would you do it too?
Experiment time again
Yes, it is time for another ill-conceived and most likely fundamentally flawed online experiment to test something that in all likelihood no one else is remotely interested in other than me and which is presented with all the get up and go of a dead camel stung by a poisonous grave scorpion. Oh the fun. This time around we will be testing the pseudoscientific claim that by recording what we say and playing those messages backwards we can tell if someone is lying or not.
This strange claim is put forward by David Oates who runs an organisation called Reverse Speech Technologies. Reverse Speech is the idea that when we talk normally our subconscious minds encode messages into the words we choose that can only be identified by recording what we say and playing it backwards. These backwards messages are said to contain the true meaning of what we said as well as always speak the truth. Amongst the various uses for Reverse Speech Oates claims that Reverse Speech can be used to detect lies. Well them sound like fighting words to me and so I have put together a very simple experiment to test that claim. And that’s where you guys come in.
In order to test this claim I have put together a video, well technically two videos but who’s counting, that contains five statements, four of which are factual and one of which is a complete fabrication. After each statement is played you will hear it again only this time in reverse. If the claims of David Oates are accurate then you should be able to hear in the reverse versions of the five statements clues as to whether they are truthful or not. Once you have decided which of the five statements you believe is the false one then all you need to do is vote for that statement in the poll that you can access from a link in the information box below the second part of the video. Unlike my pervious experiment the results of how people have voted and the details of which statement is in fact the false one will be accessable immediately so you don’t have to sit around for ages waiting for me to make another video explaining how everything went.
Ok so it is not as sexy as testing psychic powers or debunking homeopathy, however as far as I can tell this is the very first time this specific pseudoscientific claim has been tested which means you will be a part of something no one has ever done before. To get involved, and I hope you will, go watch this video and simply follow the instructions you will find there. Sorry my video presentation is somewhat less than dynamic, that is really something I have to work on.
Pope in-fallacy
A recent speech by the current Pope, in Britain, where he links atheism and Nazism has caused some controversy in the blogosphere and in our own forums. The Pope spoke of “a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society” and went on to express concerns over “aggressive forms of secularism”. This is such a common trope in debates that I wanted to take an entire blog post to explain what I see as the gaping flaw in this form of argument. What I want to discuss is the way atheism and theism should be properly related to religion and ideology and why it is incorrect to set up atheism as the counter-position to religion.
Atheism, at its most inclusive, describes anyone who has no belief in gods. From even this basic understanding, it is remarkably difficult to see how atheism could be expected to produce any action from an individual atheist. There is no causal line from the absence of a single belief to any other belief or action, be it good or bad. Even explicit atheism (the denial of gods) does not imply any further belief or action. If we say this for atheism, in order to be consistent, we must also say this for theism. Theism (the belief in gods), as a single belief, does not entail any other beliefs or actions by the individual theist. A theist may believe in the philosopher’s god, a non-interventionist god, Allah, the trinity, or a whole pantheon of pagan gods. But even these basic beliefs about the nature of gods are additional to the initial claim of theism, not derived from it. Taking the example of the Thirty Years war, the Pope would have us blame theism for the conflict. However, given both sides of the conflict were theists this conclusion makes little sense. The true dividing factor was the different religions, Catholicism and Protestantism, which each side maintained. My contention is that while atheism and theism are blameless in the great atrocities of history, ideology and religion should be held to account.