A Conversation Among the Four Horsemen

[_EAllusion]

I was quoting Varghese, who has considerable experience debating the atheist position, so I highly doubt he is misrepresenting it.

Lol. And since LDS apologists have considerable experience debating critics, they never misrepresent their positions.

[_GoodK]

The atheist position is, "I have heard the argument for your God, evaluated your evidence and or Holy books, and decided it's bogus."

That's just another atheistic creedal statement that avoids having to deal with evidence that challenges one's asumptions.

But is the evidence that challenges the atheist position really evidence? The more I think about it, the more the "evidence" seems lacking and evidence against scientific theory, not evidence for God.

For example, your apt marble table reference. If I conceded you had a point here, it still wouldn't mean anything besides matter doesn't change on its own.
It wouldn't be an argument for a divine creator any more than it is an argument for some type of Matrix-esque theory, one where our experience is really a simulation running on some sort of alien supercomputer.

An atheist would be hard pressed to deal with evidence that really demonstrates there is some truth to Christianity, or Islam, or religion, creation (however vague one wants to get in their beliefs) -- but so far there is no evidence that does this.

The evidence is illustrated in the analogy above, which I believe is referring to matter that existed before the big bang. According to the general atheistic assumption, "In the beginning" there was matter.

You speak of general atheistic assumptions, yet I'm certainly not assuming anything about the existence of matter prior to the Big Bang theory in my "atheism." Do any other atheists here make that assumption?

We know there is evidence for the Big Bang (expanding universe) but there still is no reason to believe life would create itself anymore than there is reason to believe life could sprout from a marble table.

I would put forth this argument again, that a lack of evidence or a gap in scientific knowledge still isn't "evidence" for a God or divine creator. It's just an argument against the infallibility of science.

I'm talking about evidence for God via inference; by realizing the impossibility of the alternative explanation.

I really disagree. The explanation that God did not create the contents of this planet is not impossible. It's actually a rather likely explanation that requires no faith.

[_dartagnan]

Funk man

Are you suggesting that anybody is asserting that self-replicating molecules existed at the time of the Big Bang?!

I think that was the whole purpose of the marble table analogy. Assuming the Big Bang consisted of non self-replicating matter, then we have to ask ourselves, where did this life-producing matter come from? Obviously, assuming there is no God, and the Big Bang created the universe, how did life emerge from dead matter?

With or without God, it had to have happened. We know it did. But this flies in the face of everything science tells us. Kinda like God, huh?

Chap continues to argue around me. Apparently, he's working off the assumption that he would be better off. He's probably right:

A large number of atheists, on this board and elsewhere, use as their preferred self-descriptor the sole fact that they reject the validity of those arguments for theism that have been presented to them. Dartagnan does not like this at all

I do not appreciate the repeated assertion to others what chap perceives to be my sinking state of emotions. This is just sideshow rhetoric, not argument. I've hardly expressed emotions here, unlike some. The fact that I haven't called chap names or lowered myself to Schmo's level, seems to be something he wasn't counting on. Now he even seems disappointed, probably because he needs to return to the drawing board to plan a new line of attack while trying to look like the humble, innocuous skeptic.

Be that as it may, chap has yet to answer for his goof, by miscomprehending what was said and then using that miscomprehension to critize something I never said. GoodK presumed to tell me what the atheistic position was. The fact is, atheistic scientists who operate outside this forum, sometimes engage the issues that the amateurs here refuse to address. Just because it isn't important to GoodK or chap, doesn't mean atheists haven't attempted to respond. When they do, there is nothing wrong in testing their explanations using the very logic they insist they rely upon. I appreciate their attempt to delve into the philosophical questions that intrigue us. They know these questions have to be dealt with if they wish to be taken seriously as professional atheists.

So dartagnan "knows" that there is exists an entity, X. When asked what the properties of X are, he refuses to give us any response whatsoever (except perhaps, by implication, that the properties of X are such that it solves whatever pseudoproblem he happens to want to put forward). But, it appears, it is this entity that he refers to when he utters the name 'God'. That really is a great help. As an atheist, I feel deeply challenged by this.

I don't need to know the details of God to know he exists. Chap seems to have trouble wrapping his mind around this, so allow me to illustrate the absurdity of this demand by analogy.

Let's say you and I are stranded on a one acre deserted island in the middle of nowhere. Every morning we see something drawn in the sand using various shapes and symbols in a clear language we do not understand. I would argue that while we were sleeping, an intelligent being makes its presence known. Chap I suppose, would tell me I'm foolish to believe such a thing, because we do not know any details about what he/she/it is. Therefore he/she/it can't really exist, and it is irrational to think otherwise.

Most of the evidence that points to God is circumstantial, subjective evidence like the above. You don't see God, you only see his work. Further, theists like chap seem to be distracted by the word God, unable, it seems, to resist the temptation to infer illicitly that the God in question must be the Christian, Muslim or whatever other God people worship. I suspect that most of this is due to the need to fight the easy straw man. Hitchens does this all the time (When he responding to Flew's conversion to theism, he just blew it off with rhetoric by talking about the absurdity of bleeding statues, etc., as if Flew had become a devout Catholic).

But what if I just said an "unknown intelligence," instead of using the word God? I use God for lack of a better term. I know science cannot explain various things. I also know that an outside intelligence had to have been involved in our existence. There is nothing delusional about saying this. Some of the greatest scientists, even Einstein, admitted that beyond all our learning in science, God's mind is the elephant in the room. I don't recall too many people calling Einstein delusional or anti-science.

From what dartagnan knows of matter, he is sure it is impossible for life to emerge from previously non-living matter (if that is what is meant by the rather odd phrasing "it is impossible for life to just create itself on its own"). I do not think he will find his assurance is shared by the great majority of scientists who study such questions.

Well, I know that no scientist has produced an experiment creating life from non-organic matter. So what consensus are you referring to? The one that takes this "possibility" on faith? That would be faith in the religion of materialism, to be sure.

EA,

Awesome. This is no less an argument from ignorance than Chopra's.

Demonstrate how, please. You're disappointing me because you're not engaging in real argument beyond "that's not true." I'm not even sure what it is you're saying isn't true. If you have something to offer, then by all means, I'm all ears.

And no, in complete contradiction to what you said, this kind of argument - intelligent design - is not taken seriously in academia, especially in the scientific community.

I didn't say that now did I? What I'm saying is that life doesn't spontaneously generate (abiogenesis) from dead matter. Yet, that has to be the assumption for scientists who want to explain the origins of life.

Lol. And since LDS apologists have considerable experience debating critics, they never misrepresent their positions.

Flew has considerable experience as a critic. Having spent many decades working with the most notable atheists, I find it hard to suppose he would be completely unfamiliar with their arguments and then misrepresent what they have said to him. Varghese's comments appear in Flew's book. His book has been out long enough for Dawkins to claim misrepresentation, if that's truly what's at play here.
(I can only post once per day now)

[_Chap]

I am glad to see that dartagnan is cleaning up his posting style - I don't think the word 'idiot' was used at all in his latest sending, and the general level of 'talking down' is diminishing markedly. And he now seems to be willing to concede that even amongst what he calls 'professional atheists' a commitment to (e.g.) some particular cosmogony, or indeed to any cosmogony, is incidental to their atheism, rather than essential to it.

But there are two things that I still can't make sense of:

1. His assertions that it is impossible for a fully naturalistic abiogenesis to be constructed (i.e. an account of the origins of living systems in which every step involves propositions in physics and chemistry, and the phrase 'and then a miracle happens' or its equivalent does not occur).

Now no-one could object to dartagnan claiming that a fully detailed abiogenesis has not yet been constructed and won widespread support. His claim is however much bigger; he has repeated in several posts claims that the construction of a detailed and valid abiogenesis "flies in the face of everything science tells us". Well, science seems to tell dartagnan things rather different from the things it tells the majority of professional scientists concerned with such matters, who tend to react to such claims in terms like these:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html

Dartagnan's assurance that an abiogenesis is scientifically impossible is a view held by a very small minority of those qualified in the appropriate disciplines. Experience shows that people who claim that 'science will never be able to explain <some feature of the physical universe> have repeatedly turned out to be wrong in the past, and on that basis it seems a good procedural rule to abstain from making strong commitments of that kind.

2. His 'propertyless God' still has me puzzled. His analogy of the appearance of mysterious but clearly artificial marks in the sand on the desert island does nothing to advance my understanding of his position. Under the circumstances he describes, I would readily concede that some human being is causing the marks to be made - whether by appearing from hiding on the island every night, or by some means remote in space and possibly time such as manipulating a robot that does the job for them. Both dartagnan and I know a lot about human beings, and neither of us doubts that such things exist. Why would I have a problem?

But this is very different to dartagnan's "I know God exists, but I know nothing about him" position. Fortunately, we get a bit more information about the referent of the G-word as used by dartagnan this time round: 'G' refers, we are told, to an "unknown intelligence", which apparently explains the stuff that (in dartagnan's view) science cannot at any given moment explain. So for instance in the time of Newton, 'G' would have explained why the planetary orbits did not become unstable (Newton was worried about that). And before the advent of biochemistry in its modern form, 'G' would have explained the peculiar properties of living matter. Now for dartagnan the function of 'G' is to substitute for a naturalistic abiogenesis.

Frankly, faced with the alternative of explaining anything by an 'unknown' intelligence like dartagnan's 'G', I would rather admit that for the moment I don't have a satisfactory explanation, and keep doing the research.

Is that because I have 'faith' in science of a kind analogous to religious faith? No. It is because rather than being a solution to any problem, dartagnan's 'G' is a huge problem in itself, of a kind much, much worse than merely tracking the process from simple molecules to a protobiont to (say) simple bacteria. May I just mention the worst problem of all - that in order to get dartagnan's 'explanation' working, we have had to assume the existence of a non-natural intelligent entity resembling nothing we have ever met before, who is imperceptible to any of our modes of physical perception, direct or indirect, who enters into no scientific proposition, and whose origins are completely mysterious. And this is supposed to be a sensible way of solving a problem about molecules?

[_Ren]

Assuming the Big Bang consisted of non self-replicating matter,

I don't know of anybody (literally no-one) that assumes otherwise. Which is why I was wondering who you were talking to, or what hypothesis you were referring to.

then we have to ask ourselves, where did this life-producing matter come from?

Well, yes - one possibility is that God created the first self-replicating molecules and then let evolution carry on it's merry way. Sure.
And it is a possibility I have no problem having present on the (marble) table ;)

It used to be 'general knowledge' a few centuries back that God simply 'popped' all living creatures into existence. Nobody held the notion of 'Common Descent' as an 'explanation' for where the complexity of life came from...

After all, frogs don't give birth to turtles, and monkeys don't give birth to humans...

...it required science coming up with that answer to dispel that notion. Now these days, only those held to be 'religious kooks' (Not only by atheists, but by other theists) believe that God simply 'popped' fully formed creatures into existence...


Complex, conscious multi-cellular organisms (like us) evolved from less complex, less conscious multi-cellular organisms.
...which evolved from even less complex, less conscious multi-cellular organisms
...which evolved from even less complex, less conscious multi-cellular organisms
...which evolved from simpler, barely conscious multi-cellular organisms
...which evolved from simple, non-conscious (Bacteria think, therefore they are?) single-celled organisms
...which evolved from relatively complex self-replicating molecules
...which evolved from simpler self-replicating molecules
...which evolved from simple self-replicating molecules.


The clear evidence leads us to a starting point of simple replicating molecules. Not at the time of the Big Bang, but at the start of the 'story of life' - around 4 billion years ago. That is where the evidence leads us.

And now the proposition is made:
"Well, it must have been God...
After all, we don't see life sprouting from marble tables, or peanut butter.".

Well - such a proclamation is easy to say. However, the lesson we learned from the arrival of 'Common Descent' should hopefully be fresh in our minds. God is often a 'bad' explanation for such things - not only because it just turns out to be a more 'mundane' explanation, but the very fact of using 'God' to fill the gap can discourage scientific investigation.
If scientific investigation hadn't been carried out into the 'Origin of the Species', then maybe we'd still (generally) believe - to this day - that God simply popped all living creatures, fully formed, into existence in one relatively short 'burst' of creation.

Abiogenesis is not a scientific theory. It is only a scientific hypothesis at this point. This is true.
But when you ask me to compare the Abiogenesis hypothesis with the answer: "Goddidit", well - I know which one I choose. That is not to say I take abiogenesis to be 'true'. I don't - I don't take anything to be true unless it has been solidly exposed to the scientific method and come out of it intact. A way hasn't been found to pass Abiogenesis through such tests - not yet anyway. The work is being done, but I still think things are a long ways off...

..just as Darwin was a 'long ways off' at some point in the past... Didn't change the truthfulness of 'Common Descent' though...

At this point, it is accurate to say that I don't know what the origin of life is / was.
But as far as choosing the 'better explanation' for the origins of life, well - there isn't much of a competition in my mind.

If you see it differently, then all power to ya.

With or without God, it had to have happened. We know it did. But this flies in the face of everything science tells us. Kinda like God, huh?

If you are suggesting that science tells us that self-replicating molecules simply cannot have been 'naturally' produced in the early conditions of Earth, then I believe that to be false. A marble table does not represent the early conditions of the Earth, so the analogy is meaningless in inspecting the possibility.

Besides - even if abiogenesis were scientifically 'proven' and it became a scientific theory in its own right - why would that rule out Gods involvement?
...we have 'theistic evolution'. Why not 'theistic abiogenesis?' (i.e. abiogenesis that was 'invisibly nudged' along by God...)

Some of the greatest scientists, even Einstein, admitted that beyond all our learning in science, God's mind is the elephant in the room. I don't recall too many people calling Einstein delusional or anti-science.

I'm interested in seeing this quote in context...

[_dartagnan]

Just woke up guys. I gotta go to work, but will respond later tonight.

[Guest]

Awesome. This is no less an argument from ignorance than Chopra's.

Demonstrate how, please. You're disappointing me because you're not engaging in real argument beyond "that's not true." I'm not even sure what it is you're saying isn't true. If you have something to offer, then by all means, I'm all ears.

I don't need to demonstrate it. It was an offhand comment. I certainly planned on doing so, but in reply to your attempting to show how God explains what science cannot. Remember, I asked for an example of something God explains that science does not. You're answer, in part, was abiogenesis and a few other things as relayed by a Christian apologist. So by all means please explain how God explains it. You quote didn't provide any explanation whatsoever as to how God provides an account of abiogenesis. Presumbably, you are operating on more than "God did it." here right?

I didn't say that now did I? What I'm saying is that life doesn't spontaneously generate (abiogenesis) from dead matter. Yet, that has to be the assumption for scientists who want to explain the origins of life.

It's hard to get at what you are saying here. If you are saying science has rejected spontaneous generation, what they rejected is a now dead theory about whole organisms, such as flies, rodents, and bacterium, springing into existence. It's a more narrow rejection than what you'd be making it out to be. That doesn't have any bearing on prebiotic chemistry transitioning into biotic chemistry. The latter is actually part of a standard scientific subdiscipline. (Simply due a pubmed search on abiogenesis or an abiogenic theory like "RNA World Hypothesis") And further, what was being talked about was how this alleged inability of science to explain something is a case for God. You quoted Varghese who very much is an Intelligent Design proponent making an ID case for God. That is, again, not taken seriously which is what my comment is in reference to. After all, abiogenesis is only a problem for atheism or a boon for theism if the existence of God adds something to the mix.

Flew has considerable experience as a critic. Having spent many decades working with the most notable atheists, I find it hard to suppose he would be completely unfamiliar with their arguments and then misrepresent what they have said to him. Varghese's comments appear in Flew's book. His book has been out long enough for Dawkins to claim misrepresentation, if that's truly what's at play here.

Those are Varghese's comments you quoted. Plus, Varghese ghostwrote Flew's book with the aide of an evangelical pastor Bob Hostetler. Are you not aware of what occured?

The Turning of an Atheist

[_Sethbag]

What evidence is there that God created the first life? I'm talking evidence, not supposition. Theists claim that "God did it" as a sort of deductive response to the apparent problem with explaining it some other way. But it is still assumed that God actually created it.

How can God's involvement be demonstrated? What does life look like that God created, that would differentiate it from life that God didn't create? Where is the actual, physical, evidence that demonstrates God's involvement?

There isn't any. That's because "God did it" is only a guess, a supposition, a response created to fill a perceived void in the conversation, and not something that people believe because there is any evidence to support it.

This is the egregious double standard of theists. They demand that scientists actually demonstrate abiogenesis in the lab in order to believe that it's possible, yet don't seem troubled in the least that there isn't even a single shred or whisp of evidence that God in fact created the first living cells. It's all a vast supposition, guess, conjecture, wishful thinking, etc.

It would be far more honest for them to limit themselves to "we don't know", and leave "God did it" out completely. They have no evidence that God did in fact do it. They just wish for God to have done it.

[_Chap]

From the NY Times article (URL above) - a sad picture of an 84 year old man who seems to have been hi-jacked by a ghost-writer's ghost-writer in his senescence. Is this supposed to be a good example of how former atheists reason their way into theism? It sounds more like an example of how theists sometimes seem to think that any tactics are legitimate so long as it is all done for the Lard.

In August, I visited Flew in Reading. His house, sparsely furnished, sits on a small plot on a busy street, hard against its neighbors. It could belong to a retired government clerk or to a career military man who at last has resettled in the mother country. Inside, it seems very English, with the worn, muted colors of a BBC production from the 1970s. The house may lack an Internet connection, but it does have one very friendly cat, who sat beside me on the sofa. I visited on two consecutive days, and each day Annis, Flew’s wife of 55 years, served me a glass of water and left me in the sitting room to ask her husband a series of tough, indeed rather cruel, questions.

In “There Is a God,” Flew quotes extensively from a conversation he had with Leftow, a professor at Oxford. So I asked Flew, “Do you know Brian Leftow?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think I do.”

“Do you know the work of the philosopher John Leslie?” Leslie is discussed extensively in the book.

Flew paused, seeming unsure. “I think he’s quite good.” But he said he did not remember the specifics of Leslie’s work.

“Have you ever run across the philosopher Paul Davies?” In his book, Flew calls Paul Davies “arguably the most influential contemporary expositor of modern science.”

“I’m afraid this is a spectacle of my not remembering!”

He said this with a laugh. When we began the interview, he warned me, with merry self-deprecation, that he suffers from “nominal aphasia,” or the inability to reproduce names. But he forgot more than names. He didn’t remember talking with Paul Kurtz about his introduction to “God and Philosophy” just two years ago. There were words in his book, like “abiogenesis,” that now he could not define. When I asked about Gary Habermas, who told me that he and Flew had been friends for 22 years and exchanged “dozens” of letters, Flew said, “He and I met at a debate, I think.” I pointed out to him that in his earlier philosophical work he argued that the mere concept of God was incoherent, so if he was now a theist, he must reject huge chunks of his old philosophy. “Yes, maybe there’s a major inconsistency there,” he said, seeming grateful for my insight. And he seemed generally uninterested in the content of his book — he spent far more time talking about the dangers of unchecked Muslim immigration and his embrace of the anti-E.U. United Kingdom Independence Party.

As he himself conceded, he had not written his book.

“This is really Roy’s doing,” he said, before I had even figured out a polite way to ask. “He showed it to me, and I said O.K. I’m too old for this kind of work!”

When I asked Varghese, he freely admitted that the book was his idea and that he had done all the original writing for it. But he made the book sound like more of a joint effort — slightly more, anyway. “There was stuff he had written before, and some of that was adapted to this,” Varghese said. “There is stuff he’d written to me in correspondence, and I organized a lot of it. And I had interviews with him. So those three elements went into it. Oh, and I exposed him to certain authors and got his views on them. We pulled it together. And then to make it more reader-friendly, HarperCollins had a more popular author go through it.”

So even the ghostwriter had a ghostwriter: Bob Hostetler, an evangelical pastor and author from Ohio, rewrote many passages, especially in the section that narrates Flew’s childhood. With three authors, how much Flew was left in the book? “He went through everything, was happy with everything,” Varghese said.

Cynthia DiTiberio, the editor who acquired “There Is a God” for HarperOne, told me that Hostetler’s work was limited; she called him “an extensive copy editor.” “He did the kind of thing I would have done if I had the time,” DiTiberio said, “but editors don’t get any editing done in the office; we have to do that in our own time.”

I then asked DiTiberio if it was ethical to publish a book under Flew’s name that cites sources Flew doesn’t know well enough to discuss. “I see your struggle and confusion,” she said, but she maintained that the book is an accurate presentation of Flew’s views. “I don’t think Tony would have allowed us to put in anything he was not comfortable with or familiar with,” she said. “I mean, it is hard to tell at this point how much is him getting older. In my communications with him, there are times you have to say things a couple times. I’m not sure what that is. I wish I could tell you more. . . We were hindered by the fact that he is older, but it would do the world a disservice not to have the book out there, regardless of how it was made.”

[_dartagnan]

No I didn't know anything about this, and as soon as I get back in town, I'm taking the book back on principle. The book claims Flew as the author!

I'll comment further then.