Saturday, December 25, 2010
A Declaration of Revolution
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for the people of a nation to seize political and economic power from a privileged minority, and to employ that power for the common benefit of the people of that nation and of all humanity, a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the seizure.
We know through scientific study that our political and economic institutions are the common property of all humanity, to be exercised not for the benefit of a privileged few but for the common benefit of all. Our rights and freedoms are not merely noble-sounding abstractions; they must ever be physically built and maintained through the labor of each and every human being. Their benefits, therefore, deservedly accrue to each and every human being. The just powers of not only the government but also the administration of the means by which we secure our sustenance and material prosperity derive from the consent and participation of the people. Whenever the institutions of a society become destructive to those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish those institutions and create new institutions to secure not only their liberty and happiness but their sustenance and material prosperity. The institutions of a society, embodying the experience of millions of people over centuries, should not be overturned lightly. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to seize power and create institutions of political and economic governance to secure their own liberty and material prosperity. The history of the Capitalist Class in the United States and the world at large is a history of grievances and usurpations, all having not only the direct object of tyranny and slavery over the masses of humanity. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
The Capitalist Class and its captive government have created a financial crisis that is impoverishing not only the United States but the entire world.
They have stolen the savings, pensions, and homes of millions, even those who have done nothing contrary to the Capitalist Class's own rules.
They have demanded the labor of future generations only to cure the ills caused by their incompetence, ineptitude and greed.
They have thrown tens of millions of people out of work, and forced hundreds of millions more to work harder and longer only to receive less; not because there is no work to be done but because the work to be done does not accrue to the privilege, power and status of the Capitalist Class.
They have poisoned our air, our land and our water, incontrovertibly the property of all humanity.
They not only threaten the very survival of hundreds of millions of people by the scientifically incontrovertible danger of global warming caused by human industrialism, but dither and prevaricate while a catastrophe may yet be averted or mitigated.
They have kept secret or demanded outrageous ransom for scientific and technical advances, advances that rest on the cultural, intellectual and scientific progress of a hundred generations, incontrovertibly the property of all humanity.
They have pursued wars of aggression, killing thousands of their own citizens and millions of innocent civilians in the countries they have illegally and immorally occupied, devastating city, town and countryside, and usurping their economic and political self-sufficiency and independence.
They have compromised or destroyed outright the political liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. No longer are the people "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
No longer do the people enjoy freedom of speech. The Capitalist Class controls all speech, lying and concealing the truth to propagate its own privilege, and imprisoning or impoverishing those whose only crime is to speak the truth.
No longer may we peaceably assemble, nor demand a redress of our grievances, but that we must endure the violence and oppression of the police and the hostility of the courts.
They have fomented discrimination and division: racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination on religion, language and culture, all to weaken the people and turn them against each other instead of their common foe.
They have waged a brutal war of occupation against their own citizens, especially African-American and Hispanic citizens, imprisoning more people, and more people of color, than any other society.
They still seek to deny the most basic human right, the right to control one's own body, to women; they seek no less to enslave half the human race to their reproductive organs.
They have abandoned the physical and economic infrastructure of the nation and the world, allowing to decay its roads, bridges, tunnels, transportation, electric power, water and sewage treatment.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our peaceful protests have been answered by brutality, our elections by subversion and corruption.
As a single individual, I do not have the authority or power to go beyond enumerating these grievances; I can only encourage the citizens of the United States and the people of the world to take possession of what is theirs, by natural, scientific and Constitutional right.
We know through scientific study that our political and economic institutions are the common property of all humanity, to be exercised not for the benefit of a privileged few but for the common benefit of all. Our rights and freedoms are not merely noble-sounding abstractions; they must ever be physically built and maintained through the labor of each and every human being. Their benefits, therefore, deservedly accrue to each and every human being. The just powers of not only the government but also the administration of the means by which we secure our sustenance and material prosperity derive from the consent and participation of the people. Whenever the institutions of a society become destructive to those ends it is the right of the people to alter or abolish those institutions and create new institutions to secure not only their liberty and happiness but their sustenance and material prosperity. The institutions of a society, embodying the experience of millions of people over centuries, should not be overturned lightly. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to seize power and create institutions of political and economic governance to secure their own liberty and material prosperity. The history of the Capitalist Class in the United States and the world at large is a history of grievances and usurpations, all having not only the direct object of tyranny and slavery over the masses of humanity. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
The Capitalist Class and its captive government have created a financial crisis that is impoverishing not only the United States but the entire world.
They have stolen the savings, pensions, and homes of millions, even those who have done nothing contrary to the Capitalist Class's own rules.
They have demanded the labor of future generations only to cure the ills caused by their incompetence, ineptitude and greed.
They have thrown tens of millions of people out of work, and forced hundreds of millions more to work harder and longer only to receive less; not because there is no work to be done but because the work to be done does not accrue to the privilege, power and status of the Capitalist Class.
They have poisoned our air, our land and our water, incontrovertibly the property of all humanity.
They not only threaten the very survival of hundreds of millions of people by the scientifically incontrovertible danger of global warming caused by human industrialism, but dither and prevaricate while a catastrophe may yet be averted or mitigated.
They have kept secret or demanded outrageous ransom for scientific and technical advances, advances that rest on the cultural, intellectual and scientific progress of a hundred generations, incontrovertibly the property of all humanity.
They have pursued wars of aggression, killing thousands of their own citizens and millions of innocent civilians in the countries they have illegally and immorally occupied, devastating city, town and countryside, and usurping their economic and political self-sufficiency and independence.
They have compromised or destroyed outright the political liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. No longer are the people "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
No longer do the people enjoy freedom of speech. The Capitalist Class controls all speech, lying and concealing the truth to propagate its own privilege, and imprisoning or impoverishing those whose only crime is to speak the truth.
No longer may we peaceably assemble, nor demand a redress of our grievances, but that we must endure the violence and oppression of the police and the hostility of the courts.
They have fomented discrimination and division: racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination on religion, language and culture, all to weaken the people and turn them against each other instead of their common foe.
They have waged a brutal war of occupation against their own citizens, especially African-American and Hispanic citizens, imprisoning more people, and more people of color, than any other society.
They still seek to deny the most basic human right, the right to control one's own body, to women; they seek no less to enslave half the human race to their reproductive organs.
They have abandoned the physical and economic infrastructure of the nation and the world, allowing to decay its roads, bridges, tunnels, transportation, electric power, water and sewage treatment.
In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: Our peaceful protests have been answered by brutality, our elections by subversion and corruption.
As a single individual, I do not have the authority or power to go beyond enumerating these grievances; I can only encourage the citizens of the United States and the people of the world to take possession of what is theirs, by natural, scientific and Constitutional right.
Friday, December 24, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (scientific edition)
Why do many Atheists insist on insulting the Religious as “illogical” But MAJORITY of scientist were religious? Are Atheists aware that MOST of the well known scientist that you know today in your textbooks were religious? MOST Were Christians (Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Jewish). Almost all of those scientists are Nobel Peace Prize winners.
The Catholic Church developed the scientific method and the law of evidence. Many Atheists assume that Christians have an arrogance against all science. But I am an avid follower of all things scientific as well as devoted to God. ...
I wonder if you Athiests are smart enough to calculate SciMath or even understand the scientific method? You claim to believe in logic. You base your logic… on a religious mans logic.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (Mickey Mouse edition)
(Sometimes the headlines just write themselves.) Re: Atheists cause trouble over 11-million-dollar Christmas treeinAbuDhabi :) Feel free, any time you feel like, to show us where Anthony Flew failed in his understanding of biology and how you are smarter than him. [Note: Anthony Flew is a philosopher, not a biologist.] ...
Do you realize how stupid you and other atheists are to compare belief in God to believing in Mickey Mouse? It just shows that you don't have a clue, it shows that you are stupider than Mickey mouse's turds. How many churches have been erected to Mickey Mouse? How many have given their lives because they have seen Mickey mouse raised from the dead? The truth is, I know you hate the truth, but here it is, believing we are here without a creator has much more in common to Mickey Mouse than believing in God does. So put your Mickey mouse ears on and have faith in anti-science like all the mousekateer atheists do!
Bruce Sterling on Julian Assange
The Blast Shack
(via Brad DeLong)
The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.
But it sure does.
(via Brad DeLong)
Americans: Churchegoers or wannabes?
Walking Santa, Talking Christ: Why do Americans claim to be more religious than they are?
C. Kirk Hadaway, director of research at the Episcopal Church
Social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.
C. Kirk Hadaway, director of research at the Episcopal Church
and his colleagues compared actual attendance counts with church members' reports about their attendance in 18 Catholic dioceses across the country and Protestants in a rural Ohio county. They found that actual "church attendance rates for Protestants and Catholics are approximately one half" of what people reported.
The rhetoric of the preamble
Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal)
(RCP Publications, Print, October 2010, $8 from Revolution Books)
One can criticize the United States Constitution on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that the Constitution perpetually privileges the capitalist ruling class, albeit indirectly. But one cannot criticize the US Constitution on rhetorical grounds, and its preamble, despite (or perhaps because of) its transparent simplicity, is a masterpiece of rhetoric.
Any society, if it is to be a society with a distinct identity, must have some way of speaking with one voice. The purpose of a Constitution is to define what constitutes that voice, what we can and cannot say with that voice, and how the people are bound to that voice as members of the society. In a time of crisis — such as the imminent failure of the Articles of Confederation or after a communist revolution — a proposal for a new voice must be sold to the population. Any state must maintain at least the passive cooperation of the people; Even the most brutal and oppressive state must still establish the instruments of oppression: the loyalty of the army and police, which must come from the people. As we have seen time and again, even the most oppressive states have fallen when the people are no longer willing or able to cooperate. A candidate state that resolves to end brutality and oppression must therefore pay even more attention to selling its voice. It must gain not just the passive but the active cooperation of the people, not just their acquiescence but their enthusiasm.
I am learning from my experience as a writing tutor that the most important part of any persuasive writing is the hook. The very first sentence must make the reader want to read your paper. If you do everything else exactly correctly but your hook is lifeless, limp, boring, you cannot hope to persuade the reader: She will not be motivated to critically engage in your arguments; she will read it "at a distance" without bothering to link it to her own opinions and attitudes.
Hence the rhetorical brilliance of the preamble to the US Constitution. It gets across two of the three aims of the Constitution quickly, simply and compellingly. First, the voice of society is the voice of the people*. We the people — not the King, not God — ordain and establish the Constitution. And the people speak with this voice "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility," and so forth. These phrases are of course vague as to what specifically constitutes a "perfect union", "justice", etc., but it's important to note that they are not at all vague in the sense that these are things we definitely want. The preamble to the US Constitution definitely "hooks" the reader: it at least offers what we want; the reader is motivated to critically engage with the material.
There's a lot of good substance in the preamble to the RCP Constitution, but in contrast to the preamble to the US Constitution, the rhetoric is limpid and boring. I speak with all due humility: I myself am an incompetent rhetorician; indeed I fancy myself an expert at rhetorical incompetence. I can't offer any advice on how to write it, but I know what I want to read: I want to read something uplifting, something that makes me eager with anticipation to join this great new project. There's a time and a place for all the complications and qualifications of communist social and political theory, but the preamble to a draft constitution is not that place. There was no need in the US Constitution to quote Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau; there's no need to quote Marx and Lenin in a communist Constitution.
The best advice I can give is to lay out the positives simply and clearly: We are going to transform society to bring about true justice, true democracy; we are going to end the systemic oppression of the working class, of racial and ethnic minorities, of non-English cultures, and most especially of women. We are going to bring about not just political democracy, not just political justice, but economic democracy and justice. No longer will the oppression of the capitalist ruling class be able to hide behind the fiction of economic necessity. And — in line with my earlier comments — be explicit: are we establishing a democracy? A republic? A one-party state? A benevolent dictatorship? Whatever form of government is proposed, you're not going to sell it if people don't know what it is. If one were (entirely hypothetically) to think a benevolent dictatorship of a person or a party were necessary, come right out and say so; obfuscation doesn't sell. (And if one were (not just hypothetically but contra-factually) intending to actually deceive the people, obfuscation belongs in the small print of the contract, not the sales brochure.)
If your first sentence, or even your first clause is not compelling, you will lose half your readers. (Hence the preamble to the US Constitution begins with the phrase "We the People", itself stirring, novel and engaging.) If the first paragraph is not compelling, you will lose half of what's left. And if you don't say everything you have to say in two or three paragraphs, you will again lose half. If you don't intend to sell the people on the Constitution, there's no need to keep them, but a people under the grudging acquiescence of a superior constitution will be worse off than a people who enthusiastic embrace an inferior constitution.
Rhetoric matters. The RCP can write to its long-time membership, but I don't believe they can communicate with the people at large. Whether they view this inability as a problem, and how to correct it if they do view it as a problem, is up to them.
(RCP Publications, Print, October 2010, $8 from Revolution Books)
- Introduction
- Republic or democracy?
- The Preamble
- Rhetoric
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
One can criticize the United States Constitution on a number of grounds, not the least of which is that the Constitution perpetually privileges the capitalist ruling class, albeit indirectly. But one cannot criticize the US Constitution on rhetorical grounds, and its preamble, despite (or perhaps because of) its transparent simplicity, is a masterpiece of rhetoric.
Any society, if it is to be a society with a distinct identity, must have some way of speaking with one voice. The purpose of a Constitution is to define what constitutes that voice, what we can and cannot say with that voice, and how the people are bound to that voice as members of the society. In a time of crisis — such as the imminent failure of the Articles of Confederation or after a communist revolution — a proposal for a new voice must be sold to the population. Any state must maintain at least the passive cooperation of the people; Even the most brutal and oppressive state must still establish the instruments of oppression: the loyalty of the army and police, which must come from the people. As we have seen time and again, even the most oppressive states have fallen when the people are no longer willing or able to cooperate. A candidate state that resolves to end brutality and oppression must therefore pay even more attention to selling its voice. It must gain not just the passive but the active cooperation of the people, not just their acquiescence but their enthusiasm.
I am learning from my experience as a writing tutor that the most important part of any persuasive writing is the hook. The very first sentence must make the reader want to read your paper. If you do everything else exactly correctly but your hook is lifeless, limp, boring, you cannot hope to persuade the reader: She will not be motivated to critically engage in your arguments; she will read it "at a distance" without bothering to link it to her own opinions and attitudes.
Hence the rhetorical brilliance of the preamble to the US Constitution. It gets across two of the three aims of the Constitution quickly, simply and compellingly. First, the voice of society is the voice of the people*. We the people — not the King, not God — ordain and establish the Constitution. And the people speak with this voice "in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility," and so forth. These phrases are of course vague as to what specifically constitutes a "perfect union", "justice", etc., but it's important to note that they are not at all vague in the sense that these are things we definitely want. The preamble to the US Constitution definitely "hooks" the reader: it at least offers what we want; the reader is motivated to critically engage with the material.
*At least in theory. In practice, of course, the voice of American society has always been the voice of the economic ruling class, first the slave-owning class, then various capitalist classes. But I'm talking about rhetoric, not substance.
There's a lot of good substance in the preamble to the RCP Constitution, but in contrast to the preamble to the US Constitution, the rhetoric is limpid and boring. I speak with all due humility: I myself am an incompetent rhetorician; indeed I fancy myself an expert at rhetorical incompetence. I can't offer any advice on how to write it, but I know what I want to read: I want to read something uplifting, something that makes me eager with anticipation to join this great new project. There's a time and a place for all the complications and qualifications of communist social and political theory, but the preamble to a draft constitution is not that place. There was no need in the US Constitution to quote Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau; there's no need to quote Marx and Lenin in a communist Constitution.
The best advice I can give is to lay out the positives simply and clearly: We are going to transform society to bring about true justice, true democracy; we are going to end the systemic oppression of the working class, of racial and ethnic minorities, of non-English cultures, and most especially of women. We are going to bring about not just political democracy, not just political justice, but economic democracy and justice. No longer will the oppression of the capitalist ruling class be able to hide behind the fiction of economic necessity. And — in line with my earlier comments — be explicit: are we establishing a democracy? A republic? A one-party state? A benevolent dictatorship? Whatever form of government is proposed, you're not going to sell it if people don't know what it is. If one were (entirely hypothetically) to think a benevolent dictatorship of a person or a party were necessary, come right out and say so; obfuscation doesn't sell. (And if one were (not just hypothetically but contra-factually) intending to actually deceive the people, obfuscation belongs in the small print of the contract, not the sales brochure.)
If your first sentence, or even your first clause is not compelling, you will lose half your readers. (Hence the preamble to the US Constitution begins with the phrase "We the People", itself stirring, novel and engaging.) If the first paragraph is not compelling, you will lose half of what's left. And if you don't say everything you have to say in two or three paragraphs, you will again lose half. If you don't intend to sell the people on the Constitution, there's no need to keep them, but a people under the grudging acquiescence of a superior constitution will be worse off than a people who enthusiastic embrace an inferior constitution.
Rhetoric matters. The RCP can write to its long-time membership, but I don't believe they can communicate with the people at large. Whether they view this inability as a problem, and how to correct it if they do view it as a problem, is up to them.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
A neutral worldview?
Metaphysics is probably the most recondite field of philosophy. Not only is the field itself subtle and complex, but it is frequently conflated (not necessarily unjustifiably) with other philosophical fields, especially ontology. In one sense, metaphysics is not about the world at all, but about the most basic principles about how we should think.
How we actually do think is the field of cognitive science and neurobiology, but in order to understand how we actually do think, we must have some notion of how we should think about how we actually do think. This curious circularity highlights one of the difficult aspects of metaphysics, the problem of foundationalism: how do we know our "first principles" — especially our first principles of epistemology — are correct? If we adopt a strict hierarchical, deductivist epistemology: a true statement is a statement derived by the canonical laws of logic from true first principles, then we have a conundrum: a first principle, by definition, cannot be deduced from anything. (The best way out of the foundational trap is, I think, the framework of dialectical materialism, but that's a topic for another day.)
One way of looking at metaphysics is as the definitions of the fundamental philosophical fields: What does it mean to say we know something? What does it mean to say that something exists? What does it mean to say that something is good or beautiful? And, most importantly: What do we mean when we call a proposition true? Your answers to these questions comprise your metaphysical system. Given this definition, it seems an easy corollary to say that communication actually happens only when there is some congruence between two people's metaphysical systems: Internally, we have to internally mean something congruent by our words at a fundamental level in order to communicate.
Presuppositional apologetics typically asserts that there is no "neutral" metaphysical system from which to evaluate competing metaphysical systems. To an extent, this assertion is obviously correct: seen as the fundamental basis of thought, the process of comparing anything is itself an exercise of thought, which itself must rest on some fundamental basis, i.e. some metaphysical system. The question, though, is: Does this uncontroversial assertion help the Christian apologist?
There are two senses of "neutral" — other than the trivially incoherent notion of absolute neutrality — that we can usefully employ. First, we can label "neutral" — in the sense of uncontroversial — the areas of congruence between any two people's metaphysical system. Second, we can determine if a metaphysical system is neutral relative to some specific proposition: if the truth or falsity of that position is not logically entailed a priori by the metaphysical system, the system is neutral relative to that proposition.
The presuppositional apologist successfully cuts off one line of naturalist argumentation, that naturalism is propositionally neutral to the existence of a specifically supernatural god. (Of course, naturalism is still neutral towards the god of more traditional apologetics, which hold that the Christian God is naturally knowable.) But the presuppositional apologist is by definition engaged in apologetics, which is some form of communication; if the apologetic is actually happening, there must be some congruence between the apologist's metaphysical system and the skeptical listener's. If the presuppositional apologist claimed there were no congruence at all, then he would be implicitly claiming that he was not engaged in apologetics, that he was simply making noises in the air his listener was unable to understand. So the presuppositional apologist must claim congruent neutrality, and therefore his protestation that there is no "neutral" ground on which to stand must be at least irrelevant and at worst intentionally misleading.
The presuppositional apologist's "real" strategy has to be that the congruence that already exists between the listener is somehow favorable to theism: that the listener already believes in some sense that not just any old god but the Christian God actually exists and is the fundamental basis for the listener's metaphysical system. The apologist need not accuse the listener of active dishonesty; the listener could simply be taking the existence of God for granted.
The presuppositionalist tactic for asserting the favorability of theism in this essentially neutral ground must therefore be to show that if we fail to explicitly presuppose the existence of the Christian God explicit, we can find internal contradictions or areas of radical incompleteness in whatever remains. At the very least, the presuppositionalist must prove that the presuppositions of Christianity are somehow better than those of naturalism.
Unfortunately, these tactics do not actually succeed. The first tactic, showing that naturalism is self-contradictory, usually relies on Logical Positivism or naive empiricism, which has been decisively rejected by naturalists for several decades, at least since Popper. The second tactic, asserting that naturalism "fails to account" for things like logic, reality, ethics, etc. could be trivially addressed by presupposing such things directly, without the mediation of the Christian God. (Of course, naturalistic philosophers have somewhat more sophisticated positions.) And Christianity simply fails to offer better presuppositions by any sense of "better" within the presupposed ground of congruent neutrality.
The only viable tactic of presuppositionalist apologetics is to trade on the difficulty of the subject matter, and to drown the listener in barely-comprehensible philosophical jargon, the thicker the better.
How we actually do think is the field of cognitive science and neurobiology, but in order to understand how we actually do think, we must have some notion of how we should think about how we actually do think. This curious circularity highlights one of the difficult aspects of metaphysics, the problem of foundationalism: how do we know our "first principles" — especially our first principles of epistemology — are correct? If we adopt a strict hierarchical, deductivist epistemology: a true statement is a statement derived by the canonical laws of logic from true first principles, then we have a conundrum: a first principle, by definition, cannot be deduced from anything. (The best way out of the foundational trap is, I think, the framework of dialectical materialism, but that's a topic for another day.)
One way of looking at metaphysics is as the definitions of the fundamental philosophical fields: What does it mean to say we know something? What does it mean to say that something exists? What does it mean to say that something is good or beautiful? And, most importantly: What do we mean when we call a proposition true? Your answers to these questions comprise your metaphysical system. Given this definition, it seems an easy corollary to say that communication actually happens only when there is some congruence between two people's metaphysical systems: Internally, we have to internally mean something congruent by our words at a fundamental level in order to communicate.
Presuppositional apologetics typically asserts that there is no "neutral" metaphysical system from which to evaluate competing metaphysical systems. To an extent, this assertion is obviously correct: seen as the fundamental basis of thought, the process of comparing anything is itself an exercise of thought, which itself must rest on some fundamental basis, i.e. some metaphysical system. The question, though, is: Does this uncontroversial assertion help the Christian apologist?
There are two senses of "neutral" — other than the trivially incoherent notion of absolute neutrality — that we can usefully employ. First, we can label "neutral" — in the sense of uncontroversial — the areas of congruence between any two people's metaphysical system. Second, we can determine if a metaphysical system is neutral relative to some specific proposition: if the truth or falsity of that position is not logically entailed a priori by the metaphysical system, the system is neutral relative to that proposition.
The presuppositional apologist successfully cuts off one line of naturalist argumentation, that naturalism is propositionally neutral to the existence of a specifically supernatural god. (Of course, naturalism is still neutral towards the god of more traditional apologetics, which hold that the Christian God is naturally knowable.) But the presuppositional apologist is by definition engaged in apologetics, which is some form of communication; if the apologetic is actually happening, there must be some congruence between the apologist's metaphysical system and the skeptical listener's. If the presuppositional apologist claimed there were no congruence at all, then he would be implicitly claiming that he was not engaged in apologetics, that he was simply making noises in the air his listener was unable to understand. So the presuppositional apologist must claim congruent neutrality, and therefore his protestation that there is no "neutral" ground on which to stand must be at least irrelevant and at worst intentionally misleading.
The presuppositional apologist's "real" strategy has to be that the congruence that already exists between the listener is somehow favorable to theism: that the listener already believes in some sense that not just any old god but the Christian God actually exists and is the fundamental basis for the listener's metaphysical system. The apologist need not accuse the listener of active dishonesty; the listener could simply be taking the existence of God for granted.
The presuppositionalist tactic for asserting the favorability of theism in this essentially neutral ground must therefore be to show that if we fail to explicitly presuppose the existence of the Christian God explicit, we can find internal contradictions or areas of radical incompleteness in whatever remains. At the very least, the presuppositionalist must prove that the presuppositions of Christianity are somehow better than those of naturalism.
Unfortunately, these tactics do not actually succeed. The first tactic, showing that naturalism is self-contradictory, usually relies on Logical Positivism or naive empiricism, which has been decisively rejected by naturalists for several decades, at least since Popper. The second tactic, asserting that naturalism "fails to account" for things like logic, reality, ethics, etc. could be trivially addressed by presupposing such things directly, without the mediation of the Christian God. (Of course, naturalistic philosophers have somewhat more sophisticated positions.) And Christianity simply fails to offer better presuppositions by any sense of "better" within the presupposed ground of congruent neutrality.
The only viable tactic of presuppositionalist apologetics is to trade on the difficulty of the subject matter, and to drown the listener in barely-comprehensible philosophical jargon, the thicker the better.
Conversation stopper
Much as I'd like to discuss abstruse metaphysical concepts with Only the Sangfroid, it's difficult to have a conversation when someone fails to observe the basic canons of intellectual honesty. Drawing unsupported inferences is one thing, but you cannot put words in someone's mouth, even with brackets. To do so is not just intellectual dishonesty, it's lying pure and simple.
In Sangy's latest missive, He quotes me as saying,
All I can do in this situation is prove he lied and call him a liar. No further conversation has even the slightest chance of being productive.
In Sangy's latest missive, He quotes me as saying,
[W]ho — besides philosophers, theologians, pseudo-intellectuals such as Sangy, and other professional bullshit artists — would ever care [about truth]?What I actually said was,
And even if the universe were as thick with causally inert objects as morons at the Creation Museum, who — besides philosophers, theologians, pseudo-intellectuals such as Sangy, and other professional bullshit artists — would ever care?The only thing an honest person could put inside the brackets would be "causally inert objects". To place one's own interpretation of another's remarks, even if that interpretation were justified (which it's not), is simply lying.
All I can do in this situation is prove he lied and call him a liar. No further conversation has even the slightest chance of being productive.
The Stupid! It Burns! (giant bolus of stupidity edition)
We have truly magnificent bolus of burning Christian stupidity at irreligion.org. (This site is usually atheist, so they're either just reprinting Christian stupidity or they've been hacked.) They don't quite cover every stupid argument there is (they seem to be missing the Thomistic arguments), but it's darn close. Put on your tinfoil hat, gentle reader; the stupidity is so powerfully concentrated I cannot be responsible for what happens if you read it.Christian Responses: Scientific Facts in the Bible
1. Only in recent years has science discovered that everything we see is composed of invisible atoms. Here, Scripture tells us that the “things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.”
2. Medical science has only recently discovered that blood-clotting in a newborn reaches its peak on the eighth day, then drops. The Bible consistently says that a baby must be circumcised on the eighth day.
3. At a time when it was believed that the earth sat on a large animal or a giant (1500 B.C.), the Bible spoke of the earth’s free float in space: “He…hangs the earth upon nothing” (Job 26:7).
Christian Responses: Questions for Evolutionists
by Dr. Kent Hovind [heh]
1. Where did the space for the universe come from?
2. Where did matter come from?
3. Where did the laws of the universe come from (gravity, inertia, etc.)?
4. How did matter get so perfectly organized?
5. Where did the energy come from to do all the organizing?
6. When, where, why, and how did life come from dead matter?
7. When, where, why, and how did life learn to reproduce itself?
8. With what did the first cell capable of sexual reproduction reproduce?
Christian Responses: “Missing Link” Still Missing
Instead of ‘a true missing link’ connecting dinosaurs to birds, the specimen [Archaeoraptor Liaoningensis] appears to be a composite, its unusual appendage likely tacked on by a Chinese farmer, not evolution. ...
Christian Responses: The Dead Sea Scrolls
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) at Qumran in 1949 had significant effects in corroborating evidence for the Scriptures. ... The Qumran texts have become an important witness for the divine origin of the Bible, providing further evidence against the criticism of such crucial books as Daniel and Isaiah.
Christian Responses: Archaeology and History Attest to the Reliability of the Bible
Writings confirming [Jesus's] birth, ministry, death, and resurrection include Flavius Josephus (A.D. 93), the Babylonian Talmud (A.D. 70–200), Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan (approx. A.D. 100), the Annals of Tacitus (A.D. 115–117), Mara Bar Serapion (sometime after A.D. 73), and Suetonius’ Life of Claudius and Life of Nero (A.D. 120).
Christian Responses: Authority and Authenticity of the Bible
The Jewish historian Josephus as well as the secular Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius all bear record of the person of Jesus.
Christian Responses: “Christians Are Bad People”
So called religious wars and atrocities that go against the teachings of Jesus:
(These include the Crusades, Spanish inquisition and burning of witches)
2,000,000 (best estimate)
Wars and atrocities from just 2 atheist regimes:
(Stalin & Mao)
60,000,000 (recorded fact)
Christian Responses: Faith and Science (Part 1)
Atheism in its classical sense in self-defeating. One cannot affirm a negative in the absolute. ... If the only statements that are true are statements that can be verified empirically, then the principle of verification itself would fail the test because of it’s own premise, “only those statements that can be empirically verified have any meaning,” cannot be empirically verified.
In the 20th century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.
Philosophers of science ... came to realize that the whole scientific enterprise is based on certain assumptions that cannot be proved scientifically, but are guaranteed by the Christian worldview.
Christian Responses: Faith and Science (Part 2)
The present favored candidate for a GUT is superstring theory, but accepting its ideas depends upon believing that theorists, on the basis of mathematical considerations alone, can second-guess the character of nature at a level of detail more than ten thousand million million times smaller than anything of which we have direct empirical evidence.
Note: String theory still remains highly speculative. It is at best a "candidate"; many physicists consider it Not Even Wrong. We don't get our answers handed to us on sliver platter; we have to speculate and then test those speculations against empirical evidence.
Christian Responses: Faith and Science (Part 3)
“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology.” ~ Professor Stephen Jay Gould (atheist)This is naked quote mining.
And last but not least...
Fundie Ramblings: Part 11
I can have fun stirring a pot of God haters… All you atheist are doing nothing, but proving Biblical prophecy. ...
Have any of you ever actually read a Bible for yourselves to know what it says? I doubt it, because if you did, you’d know that there are more Scientific facts in it than any Science book.
I've just reproduced a sampling of the burning stupidity there. Read the posts yourself to get the full impact... If you dare! [cue scary music]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)