Skip to main content

contra Bart Ehrman's claim that he's a better man now that he's an agnostic

First of all, it's worth asking whether his Christian morality was focused upon the desire to encounter Christ in the faces around you... or whether it was all about getting assurance of salvation (and acting nice to reassure oneself that one is part of the elect0.  If the latter, then his claim is plausible.

But even granting this, I would turn the tables on him in the following manner: 

I would change the question being asked.  It is not  whether good Christians who became non-believers continued to do good or better things, but whether any evil persons came to desire to live genuinely human lives once they came to believe in God AND to contrast that with the answer to the question regarding whether any vicious persons came to do the same once they became thorough-going materialists.  

(understatement time): It's hard to see how materialism helps one to discover one's own humanity, one's common destiny with other human beings... it's easy to imagine how the contrary might well be the case.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...

particular/universal event/rule

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....