Skip to main content

debate point re OT and God

Both sides would grant that if the Old Testament is true then God exists.  But it would be an appeal to ignorance by the theist to simply assert that it is true unless the atheist can prove otherwise.  That is, one may not say, "I am presupposing that the OT is true until you prove otherwise."  And the atheist would be committing the fallacy of denying the antecedent if he or she argued that because the OT is false, it follows that God doesn't exist.  Why?  Because there may be other reasons besides revelation for affirming God's existence: consider, for example, as the reasons that made Plato to affirm the existence of a kind of supreme being, which he called the Good, and the reasons that made Aristotle affirm the existence of a highest being, which he called Thought.  These and other reasons may be marshaled as parts of a longer argument that demonstrates that the same Supreme Being is provident (which is what both theist and atheist mean the word 'God' nowadays).  These reasons may be available to us even if we are ignorant or doubtful about the truth of the OT and NT.  And for an atheist to focus on the question of scripture's veracity in the face of reasons for God that are independent any revelation is to offer a red herring.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.