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| I'm Paul Wright, a software engineer based in Cambridge, England. This is my blog, hosted by LiveJournal. I mostly blog about my interests: religion (I used to be a Christian, and then became an atheist), philosophy, science, and, occasionally, ballroom dancing. You can find out more about me and about this blog in my profile. Note that there are both proper blog entries and my link blog here: those links will let you filter for one or the other. You're welcome to join in the discussions here, though if you're new, it'd be a good idea to check the comment policy first. Note that because I get so much spam, I no longer permit anonymous comments: you'll need to log in with either a LiveJournal ID or another identity provider (like Google, Twitter or Facebook) and then confirm your email address to LiveJournal before you'll be able to comment here. If you want to keep track of this blog without having to keep visiting this page all the time, you can subscribe to the feed of it (or "friend" me if you're on LiveJournal yourself):  here's the feed, or you could use Google Reader:  . This blog is also syndicated over at Planet Atheism. Feel free to introduce yourself by leaving a comment below. | |
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| - Unexpurgated atheist FAQ
- At last, it can be told! Via andrewducker.
(tags: faq funny religion atheism parody)
- synecdochic: the Megaupload indictment, in detail; or, a crash course in the DMCA and why they're totally fucked
- Why Megaupload are doomed, and some interesting stuff about the DMCA. Via andrewducker.
(tags: internet law DMCA copyright megaupload)
- YCRFS 9: Kill Hollywood
- "Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise." Y Combinator requests that startups come up with ways to kill Hollywood.
(tags: internet startups technology sopa hollywood ycombinator)
- A Positive Account of Property Rights
- Vladmir M on Lesswrong linked to this as a good explanation of what Schelling points are. It's also an interesting theory about how property rights could arise out of a Hobbesian state of nature, although I'm not familiar enough with the literature to know whether that part of it makes any obvious errors.
(tags: game theory philosophy Hobbes Schelling politics Friedman economics)
- Alex Gabriel // LSE's student union copy UCL's
- More on the LSE nonsense: "Essentially, a large of group of Muslim students felt offended that there were pictures of Mohammed on the facebook group. As a result, they felt that our facebook group was no longer a ‘safe space’ for Muslims." Alex Gabriel points out that the Facebook group in question is a closed one, and certainly not what you'd expect to be a "safe space" for Muslims. It would certainly be crass for a student atheist group to put that cartoon on posters, say, but complaining about a closed Facebook group is just whining for the sake of it.
(tags: lse university freedom religion politics islam)
- LSE Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society say giving offence is no crime
- More student unions and offended Muslims vs atheists, this time at LSE. "Ms Bartle commented, ‘There has been too much conflation recently of being offended and being intimidated, with the implication being that they are equivalent. Such an assumption is a potential threat to free speech and free debate, and we are concerned to address this underlying problem in the long term.’"
This time, it's about the LSE atheists putting a cartoon on their Facebook page. Again, why are the Muslims looking at it? Very strange. - Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America : The New Yorker
- Astonishing (and worrying that it's apparently so easy for British people to be deported to the US).
(tags: america law crime politics prison)
- The New French Hacker-Artist Underground | Magazine
- "There is no law in France, it turns out, against the improvement of clocks." Fascinating stuff. Via mefi.
(tags: restoration tunnels underground activism france paris pantheon)
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| - When people ask why I have a problem with religion, it's hard to come up with a single answer... - Imgur
(tags: christianity islam religion)
- Worrying developments for freedom of expression in the UK - Various - Various - RichardDawkins.net
- "This thread combines a number of examples where atheists, humanists and/or secularists have been threatened or coerced into silence, both by Muslims and by institutions or other groups apparently subscribing to the view that 'If someone believes it, you must respect it'. All these examples have happened in the UK in the course of the last week or so. ... But the key thing to note in all these cases is that it is no longer just the religious who would inhibit our freedom of expression: increasingly, secular bodies are buying into this invidious idea too, all in the name of 'tolerance' or 'community relations' or 'respect'."
Fuck it, I'm joining the EDL.
Just kidding, I don't have the beer belly or the conviction for football hooliganism and I've never seen a "Muslamic raygun". Still, it is alarming to see these things happening in Britain. Who are the reasonable opposition? Can't leave something that important to the Nazis.
(tags: sharia speech freedom islamism uk islam)
- Atheism isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship … with reality | Unreasonable Faith
- A summary of blogged responses to that "I hate religion but love Jesus" video that's been doing the rounds. I made a comment at the bottom. Also good for the comment thread on Atheismo, the diety for atheists.
(tags: relationship with god video atheism religion)
- Driscoll & Brierley on Women in Leadership « Cognitive Discopants
- Well known complementarian and fan of big strong manly men, Mark Driscoll, recently did an interview with Justin Brierley of Premier Christian Radio. Driscoll came out with a few choice quotes about Christians in the UK (“guys in dresses preaching to grandmas”).
He then had a go at Brierley for going to a church run by a woman (Brierley's wife!) and not believing in penal substitutionary atonement and eternal conscious torment in Hell (Brierley is an annihilationist: we unsaved will be told off and then vapourised rather then being tortured forever). Fun times.
(tags: homosexuality premier christian radio complementarianism mark-driscoll religion church mark driscoll christianity women sexism markdriscoll)
- The Rise of the New Groupthink - NYTimes.com
- "Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption."
(tags: flow solitude groupthink team office work creativity)
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| - Project Euler
- "Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."
(tags: puzzles maths mathematics programming)
- Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: How to replace the School ICT Curriculum
- 10 PRINT "PAUL IS SKILL"
20 GOTO 10 - The undeniable fact and its inescapable consequence | Alethian Worldview
- "The undeniable fact is this: God does not show up in the real world, not visibly, not audibly, not tangibly, not for you, not for me, not for saint or for sinner or for seeker. ... the inescapable consequence is that we have no alternative but to put our faith in men rather than in God. ... When men say things on God’s behalf, and make promises that God is supposed to keep, the word they tell you is the word of men, not the word of God. That’s true even if what men say is, “This is the word of God.” They’re not giving you God’s word, they’re giving you man’s word about God’s word (or at least what they claim is God’s word). Sure, you can believe what men tell you about God if you like, but if you do, you are putting your faith in men. Before you can have faith in God, God has to show up, in person, to tell you directly the things He wants you to have faith in. Otherwise it’s just faith in men."
(tags: deacon-duncan religion atheism)
- I Am An Atheist: 16 Things Atheists Need Christians to Know
- Some only relevant to Americans, but there are some good general points.
(tags: lists religion christianity atheism)
- Atheists face Muslim-led censorship from UCL Union
- The atheist society at UCL posted a Jesus and Mo cartoon as the image accompanying their Facebook event. One Muslim objected as the cartoon depicts Mohammed in a pub (what the Muslim was doing looking at the Facebook page for an atheist event isn't clear). The UCL student union got a complaint from someone and asked them to take it down. They refused. The story got picked up by atheist blogs and Dawkins Our Leader and hence the newspapers. The union backed down though there's still the vague threat in the air that the atheist soc might be guilty of bullying or harassment.
Hopefully the media attention has put the fear of God into the Union and they won't be so silly in future. Muslims do not have the right not to be offended.
(tags: richard-dawkins dawkins ucl university censorship religion islam)
- Bash Tips for Power Users
- I didn't know about the "fc" command. Nice.
(tags: programming shell unix linux bash)
- Twilight: The Use of Sparkle
- If Iain M. Banks had written Twilight. Funny, even though I've never read/seen any Twilight.
(tags: parody twilight iain-m-banks sf science-fiction sci-fi culture books)
- So who is good enough to get into Cambridge? | Education | The Guardian
- Guardian reporter sits in on admissions meetings at my old college. Inevitably, the photo with the story is of King's, because it's prettier than Churchill.
(tags: churchill cambridge-university university education cambridge)
- Fat Acceptance Movement. || kuro5hin.org
- kuro5hin is still alive: who knew? Anyway, this is a recent Diary entry from HollyHopDrive who discovered a bunch of Fat Acceptance blogs while looking for fitness information. Her division of what she found into stuff she agrees with and bullshit looks sound.
(tags: medicine health fat)
- The Americanization of Mental Illness - NYTimes.com
- The expression of mental illness is cultural: anorexia was more or less introduced to Hong Kong by newspaper articles. A view in which mental illness is caused by brain problems rather than childhood experiences or demons actually makes people less sympathetic to those with mental illness, because they're perceived as being unfixable.
(tags: anorexia schizophrenia culture science psychiatry psychology)
- Tags:atheism, books, cambridge, cambridge university, christianity, culture, education, islam, link blog, programming, psychology, religion, richard dawkins, science, science fiction, university
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| I've been commenting in other places. You might be interested in where: The Evil God Challenge Stephen Law's Evil God Challenge is a new take on the problem of evil. The challenge is to ask theists why it's more reasonable to believe that there's a good God (accepting the standard theodicies for the problem of evil) than it is to believe there's an evil God (accepting flipped theodicies, for example, that evil God created us with free will so that we could freely choose to do evil). Law has been dealing with responses to this challenge ever since his debate with William Lane Craig. On his blog, he mentions a conversation with Glenn Peoples. That blog entry attracted a few comments, so I joined in. What does good mean?There's been a lot of chat about just what Law means by good or evil, how this is "grounded" and so on, as theists often want to say you cannot have meaningful morality if there's no God (there's no reason to suppose this is true, as far as I can tell, but it's psychologically appealing even to atheists). Law says he's using the terms in a "pre-theoretic" sense (I suspect because he doesn't want the whole thing to turn into an argument about meta-ethics). Interestingly, I found a quote from Craig which says that theists shouldn't argue that atheists can't meaningfully use moral vocabulary, so I commented on that: it seems perfectly reasonable to use terms like (morally) good in the common sense way, or to point to cases like gratuitous suffering and call those evil (in fact, Law says he can make his challenge about suffering rather then morality: the challenge is then why it's reasonable to believe there's a God who doesn't want us to suffer unnecessarily, I guess). Thomist GodI've also been responding to some comments by someone called BenYachov. He's been arguing that if you believe in the God of Thomas Aquinas (which apparently is the official God of the Catholic church), Law's challenge won't faze you. I was trying to tease out why. BenYachov claims that God "grounds" moral goodness but isn't himself a moral agent (a moral agent being something which is capable of acting on moral considerations). As Thomist God is not a moral agent, he cannot be said to be morally good or morally evil. Nevertheless, he is still Good in some sense related to "grounding" all goods and being perfect (the Thomists seem to like to use lots of Capital Letters for Significant Concepts). I wondered at this Thomist God's "goodness" if it means nothing like moral goodness. I went on to say that this God is morally alien. He's a bit like what happens when weird aliens build an artificial intelligence. I was also still not sure what it means for Thomist God to "ground" moral goodness as he's not morally good, only Good: as I've said before, the word "ground" should be a red flag in debates like these, as it often means the other person is skating over something for which they don't really have a good explanation. Finally, I responded to another comment of BenYachov's, by saying that there's no reason to worship something because it created you or because it's mysterious. I get the impression that there's a lot of work being done by Capital Letter Concepts in BenYachov's world, and a lot of trading on different meanings of the world "good". There's also the weird idea that these meanings have something in common and that there's an attribute called "Goodness" which somehow incorporates them all. This seems a bit like what Jaynes calls the Mind Projection Fallacy, the idea that every property we perceive in something is out there in the world. Problem page Over on Metafilter, there's a section where people can ask questions. Someone recently said they'd been talking to their father-in-law about religion and philosophy and ended up accidentally de-converting him from Christianity. Now the mother-in-law is trying to cut her daughter and son-in-law off. I posted a response trying to explain what the in-laws might be thinking, and suggesting that the best way back with the mother-in-law might be to talk about seeking truth. Brains, sex, fat![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=88.8) livredor posted about brain sex differences and fat acceptance. I commented: I think the popularisation of research into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology leads to unscientific statements (see also this Less Wrong article about one way to misunderstand it), but there's also a set of feminists who don't believe in innate brain differences between men and women because it contradicts their ideology, making them equivalent to creationists. In the case of fat acceptance, I was also a bit suspicious of activist claims that the medical establishment is wrong about fat being unhealthy being linked with the desire to see fat people treated more kindly. I owe livredor some replies there. | |
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| - The return to religion - Telegraph
- "Church attendances, in freefall for so long, have started to rise again, particularly in Britain’s capital city. Numbers on the electoral rolls are increasing by well over two per cent every year, while some churches have seen truly dramatic rises in numbers." (The electoral roll of a church is the only way the C of E has of recording membership: they don't really go in for the formal process of the free churches, as it's an established church).
This is interesting, though not sure how good the evidence of a revival is: you've got a couple of anecdotes plus evidence of a positive second derivative (decline is slowing). It's interesting that this is always presented as being about an alternative to shopping and a search for meaning rather than being about the evidence. I suspect that's the way it actually works though, depressingly.
(tags: christianity church-of-england anglican c-of-e telegraph uk religion)
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| - Times Higher Education - Divine irony
- Blackburn's summary of Hume's "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion".
(tags: simon-blackburn david-hume hume history religion philosophy atheism)
- A Christmas Cracker
- "On 16 December 1893, when Parliament had been in continuous session for 11 months and it had been announced that members would have only four daysě°˝€™ recess for Christmasě°˝€”Mr Gladstone received a letter in a neat but childish hand, written on ruled paper, from the infant son of the Earl of Pembroke."
(tags: parliament history funny politics)
- Good Minus God: The Moral Atheist - NYTimes.com
- Louise M. Antony writes a reasonable introduction to the idea that being an atheist does not lead to moral nihilism. Mentions the Euthyphro dilemma but doesn't deal directly with apologetical responses about "God's nature" (but then we've dealt with those here before, I think).
(tags: Euthyphro morality ethics philosophy religion atheism)
- Of Hume and Bondage - NYTimes.com
- Simon Blackburn defends Hume from some sillier criticisms, and wonders what philosophy is for.
(tags: simon-blackburn hume david-hume philosophy)
- Talking Philosophy | Religion and science: the issue that won't go away
- This is great, and has productive discussion in the comments too. Subscribed!
"Recall that the rise of science did not subtract from our pre-existing resources for investigating the world. Rather, it added to them; and the old pragmatic and scholarly methods and the new, distinctively scientific, ones can always be used together in any given case. We need to know whether such claims as that Jesus rose from the dead and that the universe was created by God are plausible when set against what we know overall about how the world works, both through methods that we could have employed anyway and through the distinctive methods developed by science.
When the question is framed like that, surely we don't think that these claims come under no pressure at all from our best empirical investigations of the world?"
(tags: resurrection russell-blackford philosophy science religion)
- Islam and "Islamophobia" - a little manifesto
- "The extreme right benefits from the availability of politically respectable criticisms of Islamic thought and associated cultural practices. As this goes on, there is a risk that the word "Islamophobia" will be used to demonize and intimidate individuals whose hostility to Islam is genuinely based on what they perceive as its faults. In particular, we should remember that Islam contains ideas, and in a liberal democracy ideas are fair targets for criticism or repudiation. ... After all, there are reasons why extreme-right organizations have borrowed arguments based on feminism and secularism. These arguments are useful precisely because they have an intellectual and emotional appeal independent of their convenience to extreme-right opportunists."
(tags: islamophobia politics religion islam)
- All things to all people, but Christmas is ... people - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
- A very human Christmas to you all :-)
(tags: religion christmas)
- Tags:atheism, christmas, funny, history, hume, islam, link blog, morality, philosophy, politics, religion, resurrection, russell blackford, science
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| - Scientific presuppositions and the supernatural « Just Another Deisidaimon
- Konrad Talmont-Kaminski on the metaphysical/methodological naturalism distinction, which he thinks is a distortion of actual naturalist views: "it effectively assumes the primacy of ontology over epistemology... assumes that to understand science one must begin with the ontology of science. This is very much understandable from the point of view of someone who was brought up on a Christian religion that is presented as having its basis in a number of ontological claims that must be taken as true. It is also a profound misunderstanding of what science is. It would be better to think of science in terms of various methods that are used to investigate the world. The scientific ontology is an a posteriori result of the application of those methods to the world. To put it in other terms again, ontological naturalism is the a posteriori result of accepting epistemic naturalism. Yet, even that is not quite right as it suggests that science can be identified in terms of some set of methods."
(tags: philosophy science religion epistemology naturalism)
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| - King Under The Mountain: Soundtrack and Adventure Log
- Someone actually ran a Dungeons and Discourse game (see the Dresden Codak cartoon). This is what happened. "In the middle of the Cartesian Plain at the confluence of the rivers Ordinate and Abcissa stands the mightiest of all, the imperial city of Origin. At the very center of the city stands the infinitely tall Z-Axis Tower, on whose bottom floor lives the all-seeing Wizard of 0=Z."
(tags: betrand-russell philosophy roleplaying dungeons-and-dragons funny)
- Cow Clicker Founder: If You Can't Ruin It, Destroy It : NPR
- Bloke makes spoof Facebook game to mock the grinding required by Facebook games. Facebook users play it for real.
(tags: games zynga facebook cow psychology)
- Embedded in Academia : Nine ways to break your systems code using volatile
- "The volatile qualifier in C/C++ is a little bit like the C preprocessor: an ugly, blunt tool that is easy to misuse but that — in a very narrow set of circumstances — gets the job done. This article will first briefly explain volatile and its history and then, through a series of examples about how not to use it, explain how to most effectively create correct systems software using volatile. Although this article focuses on C, almost everything in it also applies to C++." Relevant to my interests as compilers get cleverer about re-ordering.
(tags: volatile embedded programming C threads multicore memory-model)
- Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism - ComicsAlliance | Comic book culture, news, humor, commentary, and reviews
- "On Scooby-Doo, do you prefer the monsters to be real or people in costumes?"
(tags: scooby doo rationality)
- The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin | Magazine
- Whatever happened to Bitcoin? Via Andrewducker.
(tags: bitcoin currency money economics wired crypto cryptography)
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|  So, I've been looking into ways of running a "proper" blog, and I've come down to PyBlosxom or Wordpress. In either case, I'll get my own hosting for it. Advantages of PyBlosxom over Wordpress: - Keeps entries in text files. I fear databases.
- Seems to have a better security record than Wordpress.
- In Python, so hackable and I'd feel I'd have some hope of understanding what it's doing (Wordpress is in PHP).
Advantages of Wordpress over PyBlosxom: - Very active developer community, so lots of nice plugins. (PyBlosxom isn't abandoned but doesn't have so many people working on it).
- More themes, some of which are pretty (PyBlosxom has a few themes in their repository, none of which are that pretty).
Anyone who's used either of those care to comment? | |
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| A thing I found while investigating how to get journal backups going again in the wake of LJ's most recent debacle: A while back, geeks kept saying that LiveJournal should be Usenet news, that is, instead of mucking about with all the tedious web forum stuff, it'd be nice to have a program which let you read comments and entries, kept track of threading and which comments you'd already read, and so on (remembering what you've read on LJ was the motivation for my LJ New Comments script, but that doesn't avoid LJ's clunky interface). This was tricky as there was no obvious way to get all the comments from an entry. There was the old comment export thing, but that only works on your own journal. You could "screen scrape" with a program that tried to pull the comments from the human-readable versions of LJ's pages, but that's considered rude because of the load it'd put on LJ's server, and it's fragile as it might break if LJ changes the human-readable output. Luckily, LJ added a bunch of new stuff to its existing interface for "clients" (programs which access LJ, like Semagic). This includes the getcomments method, which allows you to get all the comments on any entry you can see. Add this to the existing machine-readable stuff (Atom feeds, getfriendspage) and you could probably write either a client specific for LJ (the iPhone client is the reason LJ added the getcomments method, by the looks of it) or a proxy to turn the whole thing into NNTP and let you use conventional Usenet clients. Who's first? (Personally, I still plan to be off once I can actually back up this journal, including the comments of my esteemed readers. But I won't stop reading, so this would be a nifty toy even for me.) Edit: another thing this allows is third parties offering comment feeds of your journal: someone could write a thing which turned the comments from an LJ entry into an Atom feed. Real blogs have these, so LJ could too. | |
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| The latest code release onto LiveJournal has introduced a problem where people are randomly getting logged into the wrong journals. This exposes friends locked and filtered entries belonging to those journals to those random people. There's no indication that this used to read the locked entries of a specific, targeted user, but there's no analysis of the problem available, so we don't know that it can't be, either. Edit: It looks like this was a problem with caching. If that's true, it's unlikely that it could have been used to read posts from a specific user. More here from cahwyguy. More information is available here. This has been going on since at least yesterday morning, yet LJ still hasn't responded officially to reports of the problem or warned users that their private data is at risk. Edit: LJ has posted about the problem, however, they don't seem to have some details right. For instance, they're claiming it was only a problem for a few minutes, when people were noticing it all day on Thursday. This is the second time that LJ has dealt with a major security incident with staggering incompetence. It illustrates that they apparently don't have a test server, i.e. they're a bunch of coyboys. My vague plans to move this blog just got a lot less vague. | |
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| Top Christian William Lane Craig is on his UK tour, and recently had a debate with the atheist philosopher Stephen Law. Premier Christian Radio seems to be organising the tour, and they've posted the audio of the debate. I listened to the debate. A short summary is below, with a longer one underneath the cut. The debate topic was "Does God exist?". Craig ran some of his standard arguments - The Kalam Cosmological argument, a First Cause argument which avoids the usual "who made God?" riposte by only claiming that "everything that begins to exist has a cause".
- The moral argument.
- An argument based on the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.
Law relied heavily on the evidential argument from evil, and his own variant of that, the one from his paper The Evil God Challenge, which Luke Muehlhauser has previously summarised here. Law has summarised his main argument in the debate on his own blog. If you want to see my notes on the whole thing, read on, otherwise, skip to the end for my thoughts on how both of them did, and how atheists might do better. ( The gory details )How did they do?Who won? Hard to say, especially as I'm obviously biased. At the very least, Law wasn't crushed in the way that some of Craig's previous opponents have been. I'm mostly going to offer what I hope is constructive criticism of Law. This is because I'm on his side :-) Law's first rebuttal sounded a bit hesitant. He seemed to be astonished that Craig had actually claimed that theists don't conclude that God is good from looking at the world and didn't know how to respond to Craig's assertion that it's all about the moral argument. Law had recovered a bit by his second rebuttal, but even later on, at times he didn't quite seem to have processed Craig's statement that looking at the world didn't provide evidence against either an Evil or a Good God: even after Craig had said that, Law sometimes seemed to be arguing as if Craig had said the opposite. Craig's not afraid to use explicit syllogisms or arguments with numbered premises rather than relying on wordy arguments, so laying out the Evil God argument in that form would have allowed people to follow it better. Law's failure to respond to the Kalam allowed Craig to score against by calling him a strange sort of atheist who believes in a creator (but see armchair generalship, below). Craig accepts that we should generally be careful about accepting miracle reports but then argues the Jesus's resurrection is special. Law is right to say that Craig's reasons are flimsy, but he needs to say why. Craig only used for 3 of his usual 5 arguments for God's existence. He left out the fine tuning argument and the argument from religious experience (which he usually turns into something close to an altar call). Law has written some strong rebuttals to the experience argument, and Law wondered whether Craig avoided it because of those. It'd be interesting to hear from Craig whether he avoided it for that reason.  In which I play the armchair general with 20-20 hindsightCraig's claim that theists don't conclude the creator is good from looking at the world sounds well dodgy: you do see Christians saying stuff about how beautiful the world is and how that's evidence for their God. When Craig makes a claim where he seems to deviate from what Christians actually do, it's worth playing that up: "If you're a Christian who thinks that the beauty of the world is evidence for the Christian God, Dr Craig would disagree with you, apparently." How do you solve a problem like the Kalam?I'm not sure what I think of Law's refusal to say much about the Kalam (other than that it was also an argument for Evil God). It allowed Craig to score, but it could have ultimately been a good tactic as Craig's previous debates on the Kalam tend to turn into people trading obscure arguments about infinite sets or quoting from popular physics books. If you're going to use Law's tactic, though, again you need to play it up more: "The title of the debate is 'Does God Exist?', and it's the Christian God that Craig is advocating, not any other possible gods. Craig is a Christian evangelist, the Kalam is there to lead you towards Christianity. But even if you are convinced by the Kalam, you are a long way from Christianity. There are countless other possibilities which shouldn't be ruled out merely because they're not as familiar as the Christian God you learned about at school, or because believing in them would make you a strange sort of atheist." Arguments from authorityIt's noticeable that Craig's allowed to quote people at length, but as soon as anyone else does, it's an argument from authority. That should be an easy (and funny) point for an opponent to make: Craig's defence of his moral argument is mostly quotes from people saying they agree with one or other of the premises. If Craig responds that he's quoting competent authorities, ask whether Swinburne or Plantinga are incompetent :-) The resurrectionCraig didn't seem as polished on the resurrection as he has in the past, perhaps because he was expecting to get into the details and quote some more authorities. Law took it in another direction: just another unexplained weird report, like a UFO sighting that we reasonably assume wasn't caused by aliens without getting into the details of who saw what. All Craig can say about that is that there's no obvious natural explanation (which Law seemed to agree with and which doesn't affect Law's argument) and that there's something special about the context, by which he seems to mean the life of Jesus. That seemed ideal ground for a more specific counter-attack from Law than just calling it "flimsy". The moral argumentThe moral argument is a tough one because people are psychologically attached to both premises. In front of a general audience, I can see why Law wanted to be a bit careful not to deny absolute morality: Craig can then go into his usual routine about how there's nothing wrong with rape on atheism, or whatever. Arif Ahmed famously did go after Craig on that second premise: "Dr. Craig says that 'objective moral values exist, and I think we all know it'. Now that might pass for an argument at Talbot Theological Seminary, and it might pass for an argument in the White House, but this is Cambridge, and it will not pass for an argument here." But Ahmed was talking in front of philosophy students. Craig does get away with denying strong feelings, responding to the problem of evil. He says that philosophers are called to think rather than go on feelings, so perhaps that's sauce for the gander: our strong feeling that some things are Just Wrong shouldn't prevent us from thinking about it. If you're going to do that you do need to genuflect in the direction of people's feelings, though, as Craig does. I think I'd try to unpick the psychological attachment: what looks different in a world where are no moral absolutes of the sort Craig wants when compared with a world where there are? Not much, as far as I can tell: even if they are there, people need some reason to obey them and it's open to them to say "I don't care what's Right". If you somehow discovered that there really were no moral absolutes, would you run out an murder your neighbour?  The segueCraig accepts that the Kalam establishes the existence of a creator who might be evil, for all the argument tells us, but goes on to say that the moral argument shows that God is good. How does he know that whatever being "grounds" morality is the same being as this creator from the Kalam? Can the "God" in that the "no God means no real morality" premise be someone other than the creator? What is it about being a creator that also grants you morality-grounding powers? It's all pretty mysterious. Similarly, what is it about the resurrection that links Jesus to the creator and to the morality-grounder? In both these cases, Craig's relying on the audience's familiarity with Christianity to make the segue from one argument to the next seem obvious, but these are very burdensome details. The audience's familiarity with this stuff makes them vulnerable to conjunction bias. It's worth trying to get the audience to take an outsider's view of how the arguments work. Other reactionsThis Christian apologist thought Craig lost and came up with his own Evil God version of the moral argument, but thought that not questioning the Kalam made Law a funny sort of atheist. Randal Rauser, another Christian, hosted an interesting discussion about Law's choice to only attack God's goodness. If Law is right, has he shown "God does not exist"? | |
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