Favourite Fallacies - The Ontological Argument

The Ontological Argument was invented by Anselm, an 10th century Archbishop of Canterbury who was later made a saint. Anselm 'reasoned' that you can conceive of a perfect god and an essential element of perfection is existence, so a god must exist.

Er... and that's it.

No. Really!

Of course, it went without question that the only perfect god was the Judeo-Christian one, so the Ontological Argument could only be an argument for the Judeo-Christian god, and no other.

Anselm has been féted through the centuries by Christian apologists for this 'proof' of their god. You still see and hear them trotting out this 'killer proof' at regular intervals and then sitting back in smug contentment as their opponent struggles. What they don't seem to grasp though is that the thing their opponent is struggling with is to understand just how they imagine they've proved anything with it.

And of course, there is always the blissful ignorance, feigned or genuine, that, if it were true, it would apply to any god which would be conditioned on the cultural ideas of perfection being used, one of which might even be non-existence.

So, if you're tempted to believe there might be something in this argument, put it to the test. Go to your window and 'conceive of' (i.e. think about) a perfect car outside.

Did one appear?

Maybe it takes a day or two to work, so if you want to wait a while and check later, please feel free...

Well, okay! Let's put these practical considerations to one side and enter the fantasy world of philosophers and religious apologists for a moment. Let's play with the Ontological Argument to see what we can do with it.

Try conceiving of any perfect thing you like, no matter how ludicrous. Does it exist? According to the Ontological Argument it must do. All you need is to conceive of something and it shall be yours...

I can conceive of a perfect universe. To me, a perfect universe is one where everything about it is amenable to reason; one in which, given the right tools, the right technology and the right understanding, everything can be understood in materialist terms. A perfect universe to me is fully understandable without the need for supernatural explanations. A perfect universe is one in which there is no need for gods or mysteries. A perfect universe is a god-free universe. Exactly like the one we live in, in fact.

According to Anselm of Canterbury, such a universe must exist.

Oops! St Anselm has now proven there is no god.

So, how can Christianity's favourite 'proof' of god prove gods don't exist? How can the same logic lead to two mutually exclusive conclusions?

Because, by simple logic, using a simple mind experiment, we've now proved the Ontological Argument to be the nonsense it always was. The Ontological Argument is like a conjuring trick where even the rabbit is imaginary, or, to put it another way, The Emperor's New Clothes. Who in their right mind was going to put their hand up and say, "Er... rihthámsócn, úre Ár, ðu bist gemaðel sceallan!" ("Er... actually, your Grace, you are talking bollocks!", as a 10th century Englishman would have said it). And who would have listened to them before they went to the stake?

Anselm's Ontological Argument is nothing more than our old friend, anthropocentric arrogance. It's nothing more than the idiotically arrogant argument that a god must exist because I believe it does; that somehow human imagination controls reality in an obedient universe which exists merely to serve the needs of humanity, so 'faith' is enough.

And that of course was exactly the universe which Anselm imagined he lived in and why he and others who shared his arrogant ignorance found his argument so convincing.

I wonder why modern theologians have never managed to update their view of the universe from that of a 10th century cleric who thought the earth was flat, the centre of it all, and all made especially for him.

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Are These The Silliest Verses In The Bible?

Surely this must rank as one of the silliest things written in the Bible, sillier even than some of the very silly claims made in Genesis and Exodus.

Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many.

Matthew 27:51-53

I think few people can have summed up this verse better that Thomas Paine, writing what must rank as one of the most devastatingly satirical commentaries on the Bible in "The Age of Reason" in 1794:

It is an easy thing to tell a lie, but it is difficult to support the lie after it is told

The writer of the book of Matthew should have told us who the saints were that came to life again, and went into the city, and what became of them afterward, and who it was that saw them - for he is not hardy enough to say he saw them himself; whether they came out naked, and all in natural buff, hesaints and shesaints; or whether they came full dressed, and where they got their dresses; whether they went to their former habitations, and reclaimed their wives, their husbands, and their property, and how they were received; whether they entered ejectments for the recovery of their possessions, or brought actions of crim. con against the rival interlopers; whether they remained on earth, and followed their former occupation of preaching or working; or whether they died again, or went back to their graves alive, and buried themselves.

Strange, indeed, that an army of saints should return to life, and nobody know who they were, nor who it was that saw them, and that not a word more should be said upon the subject, nor these saints have anything to tell us! Had it been the prophets who (as we are told) had formerly prophesied of these things, they must have had a great deal to say. They could have told us everything and we should have had posthumous prophesies, with notes and commentaries upon the first, a little better at least than we have now. Had it been Moses and Aaron and Joshua and Samuel and David, not an unconverted Jew had remained in all Jerusalem.

Had it been John the Baptist, and the saints of the time then present, anybody would have known them, and outfamed all the other apostles. But, instead of this, these saints were made to pop up, like Jonah's gourd in the night, for no purpose at all but to wither in the morning. Thus much for this part of the story.

Thomas Paine then draws the all-too-obvious conclusion from this ridiculous passage:

The tale of the resurrection follows that of the crucifixion, and in this as well as in that, the writers, whoever they were, disagree so much as to make it evident that none of them were there.

Perhaps there are some Christians who can answer the questions Thomas Paine raised over 200 years ago and can counter with reason the conclusion he draws...

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Children Of An Amoral God.

How many times do you hear a Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Sikh claim there can be no morality without a god? How many times do you see Atheists on Twitter and elsewhere being told they have no morals and have no way of telling right from wrong; that you can't trust an Atheist because they don't know why it's wrong to kill, rape, steal and abuse children?

Let's look at this for a moment.

Do these people really believe that, before their holy book was written down and people heard about their god's laws, people simply went around killing, raping, stealing and abusing children and it didn't occur to anyone that it was wrong in any way? Do they really believe that suddenly people heard of these new laws and thought, "Ah! In that case I had better stop this killing, raping, stealing and child abuse, or a god will punish me"? Is it realistic to assume that, before the Bible or the Qur'an were taken outside the Middle East to Europe and Asia, society consisted of people raping, murdering and stealing and that no child was safe?

Richard Dawkins on William Lane Craig

Richard Dawkins' explaining why he refuses to debate with William Lane Craig.

Interesting as much for Dawkins' reasons as the revolting WLC quotes where he attempts to justify genocide and child murder. One can almost hear Adolf Hitler saying "I wish I'd said that!" (Tweet this)

Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig | Richard Dawkins | guardian.co.uk:

'via Blog this'

It speaks volumes of certain branches of modern Christianity that William Lane Craig is highly regarded as a leading exponent of the faith. Other leading Christians have been noticeable by their reticence to come forward and publicly dissociate themselves from William Lane Craig's repugnant views.

They may, of course, avail themselves of the comment section of this blog should they wish to purge themselves of that sin of omission.

Come See A Christian Promoting Genocide

Yesterday we in the Twitter community witnessed the grotesque spectacle of another Christian apologist trying to justify and defend genocide and child murder:

Admittedly he was only taking his inspiration from a leading apologist, William Lane Craig.  Apparently, it's fine, just so long as you remember to blame it on a god.

Anyone wishing to copy this image is more than welcome to do so.

Have You Found Jesus?

If you're looking for Jesus you should be able to find him in the Bible... shouldn't you?

1. How did Mary and Joseph know Mary was Expecting God’s son?
   
   • Joseph was told about it in a dream, so he decides not to divorce pregnant Mary. (Matthew 1:18-20)
   • An angel told Mary. (Luke 1:26-31)
2. When was Jesus born?
   
   • When Quirinius was Governor of Syria (6-12 AD) (Luke 2:2)
   • When Herod the Great was King  (37-4 BC) (Matthew 2:1)
3. Where was Jesus born?
   
   • In the house in Bethlehem where Joseph and Mary live (Matt 1:18 – 2:23)
   • In a stable in Bethlehem to where Joseph and Mary have travelled to take part in a census (Luke 1:4 – 2:40)
4. Who came to see Jesus when he was born?
   
   • Unspecified number of 'wise men' from the East (Matthew 2:1)
   • Unspecified number of shepherds (Luke 2:8)
5. When did Jesus become God’s son?
   
   • When he was resurrected (Acts 13:32-33)
   • When he was baptised (Luke 3:22)
   • When Mary conceived him (Luke 1:35)
6. When did Jesus cleanse the Temple?
   
   • The week before he died (Mark 11:15)
   • Right at the beginning of his three-year ministry (John 2:14-16 )
7. How many ‘signs’ did Jesus do in Jerusalem?
   
   • Water into wine – the ‘first sign’ (John 2:11)
   • Many more signs follow (John 2:23)
   • Then he heals a centurion’s son – the ‘second sign’ (John 4:54)
8. When was Jesus crucified?
   
   • The day before Passover at about noon (John 19:14)
   • On the day of Passover at 09:00 (Mark 15:25)
9. Who asked Jesus where he was going at the ‘Last Supper’?
   
   • Peter – “Lord, where are you going?” (John 13:36)
   • Thomas – “Lord, we do not know where you are going.” (John 14:5)
   • Jesus – “... none of you asks me where I am going.” (John 16:5)
10. What were Jesus’ last words on the cross?
    
    • “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46)
    • “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” in Aramaic. (My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?) (Mark 15:34)
11. When was the land cast into darkness and the  curtain in the Temple ripped?
    
    • At the moment of Jesus’ death (Mark 15:38)
    • When Jesus was still alive (Luke 23:45)

So, if those claiming to be eye-witnesses to the events can't agree on anything, no use looking in their records to find Jesus.

Which leaves us with... precisely nowhere, because no contemporaneous historians noticed anything worth writing about, apparently.

No wonder Jesus' followers keep asking us if we've found him. Tweet This!

Further reading:

Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) by Bart D Ehrlman

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The Kalâm Cosmological Fallacy

The Kalâm Cosmological Argument (KCA) has its origins in medieval Islam of the Kalâm tradition but it has been adopted by Christian apologists, notably William Lane Craig, who appear to believe it proves only the Christian god of the New Testament, ignoring the fact that it was originally formulated to ‘prove’ the Islamic god of the Qur’an.

1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.
4. That cause must be God.

In essence, the KCA is arguing that:

1. There can be no natural cause for the universe.
2. Therefore the cause must be supernatural.
3. The only possible supernatural cause must be whichever god the argument is being used to promote.

Clearly, we only need to refute 1 for the entire argument to collapse since this is the premise from which the rest is assumed to flow. We only need to show that a natural cause is possible to refute the KCA. The onus of proof lies with those using the KCA to prove their implicit claim that the cause MUST be supernatural, so the onus is upon them to refute our possible natural cause AND show that there are no other possible natural explanations.

Unless they are able to do so, reliance on the KCA is dishonest and disingenuous.

Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause.

So You Want To Be An Apologist For Christianity

Important note:
If you were looking for the Muslim Apologists' Handbook you've got the wrong one. You need So You Want To Be An Apologist For Islam. Some of the words a slightly different and you don't want to find you've promoted the wrong god by mistake, do you.

So you've decided to be an internet apologist for Christianity.

You're going to come up against a lot of people with facts, logic, reason, complicated arguments, and evidence; people who've studied the Bible; people who've even studied science and maybe have degrees from universities.

Have no fear. None of this should bother you if you use the following guide:

So You Want To Be An Apologist For Islam

Important note:
If you were looking for the Christian Apologists' Handbook you've got the wrong one. You need So You Want To Be An Apologist For Christianity. Some of the words a slightly different and you don't want to find you've promoted the wrong god by mistake, do you.

So you’ve decided to be an internet apologist for Islam.

You’re going to come up against a lot of people with facts, logic, reason, complicated arguments, and evidence; people who’ve studied the Qur’an; people who’ve even studied science and maybe have degrees from universities.

Have no fear. None of this should bother you if you use the following guide:

The Doublethink of the God Delusion

Doublethink or the ability to simultaneously hold two mutually contradictory opinions.

This blog is a response to the challenge from @TweetMinistries on Twitter to comment on a blog by Gary Gutting, a philosophy teacher at the University of Notre Dame. The blog was a critique of, “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins.

Gutting's orginal blog may be read at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/on-dawkinss-atheism-a-response/

Gutting starts off badly and shows he hasn't understood what he is criticising by summarising Dawkins as saying natural selection explains the complexity of the universe. Dawkins only ever argues that natural selection accounts for the diversity and complexity of life, not of the universe. However, this is not the central argument of Gutting’s case.

The central argument is that Dawkins failed to take into account the theological argument that God is a special case and can be regarded as irrational, therefore it should be exempt from arguments aimed at showing there is no rational basis for a belief in one.

Gutting correctly points out that Dawkins' argument is that a creator god would necessarily be more complex than the universe it created, therefore the argument for a god from complexity is unsatisfactory in that it simply introduces another unexplained layer of complexity, so not only failing to solve the problem but actually making it worse.

He then complains that Dawkins never addressed the fact that, “philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God”.

This neatly sidesteps the problem of the necessary knowledge and information required to create a universe with all its complexity. The definition of God is shifted dramatically away from an omniscient, omnipotent god capable of emotions such as love and anger, able to formulate morality, hand down laws of behaviour and to monitor and record our thoughts, and in whose image we were created, to something much easier to fit into the debate at hand. This god is now a simple substance, presumably having no complexity whatsoever, yet still has the “power and knowledge attributed to it”.

In other words, this god has complexity without having complexity. Yep! That IS irrational, but that’s not a problem either. You see there is always “the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what). On this traditional view, God’s existence would be, so to speak, self-explanatory and so need no explanation...”, something Gutting also complains that Dawkins didn’t take into account.

What Gutting is complaining of here is that Dawkins should have accepted the workarounds for the difficult questions which theologians have assiduously devised to help them ignore them, and that he cheated by not allowing for them.

Yes indeed, Dawkins, in his argument that there was no rational explanation for a god did not take into account that there is an irrational explanation which should have been regarded as rational because it’s not fair to subject it to rational analysis (because it would fail that test).

Gutting then attempts to support this view by reference to Bertrand Russell’s point that we would require very strong evidence to believe that there is a teapot in orbit around the sun. Dawkins agrees with Russell that an extraordinary claim such as that requires an extraordinary level of supporting evidence to justify its acceptance.

He points out that, if astronauts had reported a teapot shaped object in orbit and satellite data had strongly suggested that there was indeed a teapot in orbit, this would be sufficient evidence to at least cause us to allow for the possibility of the teapot hypothesis being correct.

Gutting then tries to argue that there is indeed just such strong evidence to support the god hypothesis. Unfortunately the only evidence he has to offer is, “There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being”, neglecting to point out that none have ever produced evidence of a reality, and, “there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God’s existence”, as though arguments from authority are a good as real evidence.

What Gutting is attempting to do here is to suggest that somehow, the subjective interpretations of perception and the opinions of philosophers should be place on an equal footing with scientific data and independent eye-witness accounts. This is, of course, nothing more than special pleading again. The god hypothesis will only work if you exempt it from the normal tests you apply to other hypotheses, therefore it should be granted these exemption without further justification.

Gutting reinforces this claim with, “But religious believers will plausibly reply that science is suited to discover only what is material (indeed, the best definition of “material” may be just “the sort of thing that science can discover”). They will also cite our experiences of our own conscious life (thoughts, feelings, desires, etc.) as excellent evidence for the existence of immaterial realities that cannot be fully understood by science”.

He has ignored the fact that neurophysiology is material and so consciousness, thoughts, feelings, etc, are not evidence of the immaterial at all (‘plausible’ seems to mean ‘convenient’ in this context). And there again is that plea of special status for the god hypothesis. Now the reason is that this god should be exempt from ALL tests of existence because it is now assumed to be immaterial and so beyond the reach of science.

In summary then, Gutting is arguing that Dawkins was wrong to argue that there is no rational basis for belief in a god because belief in god is irrational and Dawkins should have accepted that as er... rational.

Presumably this form of 'logic' is perfectly acceptable in theological circles.

We also have here yet another example of the special pleading which theologians use to defend their god hypothesis. Their little hypothesis wants to play with the big boys of science and compete on an equal footing, but it needs affirmative action and special assistance to get by. It’s not fair that it should have to take the same tests scientific hypotheses have to pass. It’s perfectly fair to claim it is as rational as scientific hypotheses even though it is irrational.

This compartmentalised doublethink is a perfect example of Dawkins’ God Delusion.

It's really rather sad that humans, in attempting to create a god, have only managed to create a seriously handicapped one.

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Refuting the Arguments For God

These arguments for God appear on http://snapshotsofgod.com/evidence.htm .

This blog examines them one by one and shows the fallacy behind them.

“If you live in a desert and never leave it, you won't find a shred of evidence for the existence for polar ice caps or polar bears.”

True, but if you had never heard of polar icecaps and bears, why would you even think of looking for them? You won’t find any evidence of Martians either but is that a reason to believe they exist? Of course not. Whilst absence of evidence is far from being proof of absence, it is most certainly supporting evidence for the idea of absence.  It is a very long way from being proof or even evidence of presence.

The extraordinary thing is that the blogger opens his blog with what amounts to a claim that the absence of evidence is in some way evidence of presence!

The temptation is to walk away right now.  Let’s hope things get better...