Here are a few interesting critiques I sometimes hear from atheists toward some theists and apologists:
You just use other people's arguments.
You never say anything new.
You're uncreative/uninspired.
Basically, the idea here is that the theist is apparently at some sort of fault because they didn't come up with their own argument.
The rational behind genuinely using this critique is absolutely fascinating to me because it should be quite clear to the actual logical thinker that no one has to recreate truth. If something is true, then it is true, even if it is boring. Even if it has been said the same way a thousand times, it is still true. Your creativity is not important to the matter.
If you already have the right answer, who cares where it came from.
It is irrelevant if I use a logical argument that someone else came up with - it doesn't somehow make it wrong. If it is a logically sound and valid argument, then... seriously, what are you trying to insist? The implications that an argument, a reality, or a truth could somehow be invalidated because it was not the speaker themselves who first uttered it is absurd. It's literally bizarre. I thought these people were supposed to be smart?
If the argument is attempting to stem from the rational that the person involved, using other people's arguments, is not smart for doing so, that is - surprise - also irrelevant. Someone can know truth and be stupid. Furthermore, it's an interesting logical leap. Someone has to be smart enough to be able to comprehend and discern between all of the various arguments and viewpoints out there - they could only be accused of being not smart if they were simply vomiting out arguments without understanding the points those arguments are making, perhaps demonstrating that they agree with two contradictory opinions without being able to back themselves up.
All in all, this "argument from unoriginality," I suppose, is certainly a logical fallacy.
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
Are Logic and Emotion At War?
While I've pondered and discussed this plenty of times before, today the thought has resurfaced in my head due to Neil Degrasse Tyson's proposed "Rationalia," as follows:
That tweet was followed in short order by another, a picture of several people holding up signs declaring themselves to be citizens of Rationalia.
I'm not the only person who finds issue with it. It was actually quite interesting to me to see all of the people who called Tyson out on the obvious failures and weaknesses of his proposal - interesting and reassuring.
See, when skeptics, truth seekers, and logical thinkers fall too far into the comforts of evidence and reason, they forget themselves. They forget something important about the world, about humanity. Well, they forget many important things about all of those things, actually.
We'll cut to the chase with the most glaring and devastating issue - the first and foremost, absolutely most important thing that proponents of the "nothing but logic" school of thought seem to forget: there is no logical argument, no evidence to be found, and no scientific case to be made for the value of a human being's life.
Let me make myself clear: there is no non-emotional, non-moral reason to not kill other people for any reason, up to and including no reason.
Even if your moral standards are baseless - i.e., you have no higher power on which to base your moral standards, people generally still have a moral inclination toward not killing other people for no reason. Without a moral standard, we do find people finding excuses and reasons to enact violence upon other people, up to and including murder. Interestingly, those reasons are based on evidence, whether that evidence is good or bad is up for debate, but no one rationalizes killing someone else without a reason. Only the truly sociopathic find themselves on that boat.
Yes, not only is there no logical reason based off of science or evidence that would allow us to conclude that killing other people is wrong, but when you employ cold, unfeeling logical reasoning into the equation, you find yourself with groups of people rationalizing murder. The use of pure, cold logic without an understanding of moral standards or the influence of emotion, and dare I say humanity, will lead people toward murder. Eugenics, genocide, ethnic cleansing - you name it. These ideologies all use "evidence and reason" to justify their immoral behaviors. And we cannot combat these reasonings with evidence - the only objections to murder are moral and emotional.
It's not that there are not objections to murder, we simply find that any and all of them are emotional or moral. Attempting to dismiss these types of reasoning as simply not valid due to the idol-worship of the holy and sacred Logic has the same results as the reason we fear an artificially intelligent robotic takeover - nothing but logic will always result in our deaths. The first person to comment on Tyson's tweet makes this point:
This is not the only thing, of course, but it is by far the absolute most important. Indeed, Tyson's proposed Rationalia would devolve in short order into a tyrannical, emotionless murder factory. With no logical reason to not kill other people, we easily find the justification for murder of the physically and mentally disabled. What reason would we have for allowing these logically and rationally inferior people in a purely logical society? When we weigh the pros and cons of allowing those unable or unfit to work and contribute, we will have plenty of evidence showing that their lives are in fact not quite worth as much as the mentally fit and physically capable populace. Surely there would be people opposed to this plan, but unless those people can provide logical evidence that their disabled friends and family could be a benefit to society, they will see them enter the execution room.
There are plenty of reasons to oppose pure emotion in regards to decision making. However, we see that pure logic is in fact deadly. The logic vs. emotion camps have created a false dilemma - these two schools of thought at not at odds with one another. They work in tandem, they exist necessarily side by side. The entire concept of humanity is based on a working relationship between emotion and logic that allows us to see the values of vastly important aspects of life like love and friendship while maintaining the ability to make the best decisions possible - usually for what we hope to be the benefit of our friends and loved ones.
This is what we tend to forget. Even those among us who champion pure logic and reason tend to still find themselves experiencing emotions of all sorts. They have families and loyalties, they create a moral framework for themselves - with or without a higher power to hold them accountable - and they, typically, fall in love. The ones who avoid emotion and relationships tend to come out miserable. The attempts to dislodge emotions from our world and our lives always fail - we either give in or give up.
A world of pure emotion would be chaotic - poor decision making, laws that contradict each other, and rampant and indefensible inequality would result. A world of pure logic would be Hell itself, an utter dystopian nightmare. Any attempts to separate these two aspects of what makes us human is an attempt to sabotage humanity.
People are inclined toward "us vs. them" mentalities. We unconsciously put ourselves into camps, form alliances with those who think like us, and consider those who think the opposite thing to be bad, stupid, or inferior. In its extreme form, you end up with, well, extremists. What happened is that camps of people who thought logic and reason were great further and further separated themselves from everything that wasn't logic and reason. Instead of recognizing the inherent values in both logic and emotion, they saw the damage that pure emotion does and they concluded that emotion is bad. Highly emotional thinkers, valuing their emotional perspectives, were shunned and pushed away from logic by the idea that logic is more important than their emotional conclusions, and found themselves separating further and further from logic. Now we have two extreme camps of people, one who thinks it's okay to disregard emotion and one that thinks it's okay to disregard logic.
They are both dead wrong.
To emphasize, dead wrong.
To further make my point, let's clarify something about evidence based decision making. Here are some straight forward facts about what "evidence" even is:
That's probably enough. Basically, what is being proposed is that people - finite, biased, imperfect and influenceable people - would regard evidence as the only method through which to obtain truth. They would then use that discerned "truth" to make decisions, laws, proposals, changes, and decide who lives and dies.
The problem should be clear, but I'll elaborate. People can misinterpret evidence, indeed, they can even purposefully misrepresent it through sophistical means - as in, purposefully manipulating available evidence to make it appear as they desire, or simply making a compelling enough case for what they want you to believe the evidence shows (when it could easily show otherwise). These "higher thinkers" already do this all the time. A society run by the people specifically showcased in that earlier picture instantly makes this proposed nation sound far more hellish than it does in mere theory.
Furthermore, there is nothing on which to base the conclusions of your evidence without some sort of moral framework. Yes, an evidence-only based system could literally not even exist, as evidential conclusions require bias. People consider bias to be a naughty word, but in reality, our entire world is shaped by biases. We can't conclude anything unless we make inferences - if we had no biases, we could not come to conclusions on anything except for the most basic and obvious of things.
Think of it this way - if you are attempting to discern the likelihood of someone having committed a crime based on the evidence for the crime, unless there is definitive, corroborating video proof, you cannot conclude whether or not they are guilty without bias. You must make that leap from "it is likely/unlikely" to "they are guilty/innocent" using inference - or, biases. If we have an eyewitness testimony, but that person has been shown to lie, has a criminal record or has a strong personal relationship or loyalty to the defense or the prosecution, then we can conclude that their testimony may be biased - it might be fabricated, or simply fake.
We have to use inferences every step of the way through the process of determining the validity of a claim. We prefer witnesses unassociated with the people involved because they are less likely to be biased - this conclusion itself is based off of our biases. A witness associated with the people involved could be unbiased, but due to our own biases, we assume it is likely that they will be biased. If we have evidence showing that the accused was present at the location of the crime, but not necessarily evidence of them committing the crime, we have to use inference to determine whether or not they were just an innocent bystander who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So evidence is clearly not the end all be all of decision making - it requires inference, which is biased by the people making the decisions. In a system where decisions are only based on evidence as seen fit by the people in charge, we are left with a situation in which the only reality is the personal biases of the governing rulers.
So, pretty much the same thing we see in government anyway.
Earth needs a virtual country:#Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence
That tweet was followed in short order by another, a picture of several people holding up signs declaring themselves to be citizens of Rationalia.
I'm not the only person who finds issue with it. It was actually quite interesting to me to see all of the people who called Tyson out on the obvious failures and weaknesses of his proposal - interesting and reassuring.
See, when skeptics, truth seekers, and logical thinkers fall too far into the comforts of evidence and reason, they forget themselves. They forget something important about the world, about humanity. Well, they forget many important things about all of those things, actually.
We'll cut to the chase with the most glaring and devastating issue - the first and foremost, absolutely most important thing that proponents of the "nothing but logic" school of thought seem to forget: there is no logical argument, no evidence to be found, and no scientific case to be made for the value of a human being's life.
Let me make myself clear: there is no non-emotional, non-moral reason to not kill other people for any reason, up to and including no reason.
Even if your moral standards are baseless - i.e., you have no higher power on which to base your moral standards, people generally still have a moral inclination toward not killing other people for no reason. Without a moral standard, we do find people finding excuses and reasons to enact violence upon other people, up to and including murder. Interestingly, those reasons are based on evidence, whether that evidence is good or bad is up for debate, but no one rationalizes killing someone else without a reason. Only the truly sociopathic find themselves on that boat.
Yes, not only is there no logical reason based off of science or evidence that would allow us to conclude that killing other people is wrong, but when you employ cold, unfeeling logical reasoning into the equation, you find yourself with groups of people rationalizing murder. The use of pure, cold logic without an understanding of moral standards or the influence of emotion, and dare I say humanity, will lead people toward murder. Eugenics, genocide, ethnic cleansing - you name it. These ideologies all use "evidence and reason" to justify their immoral behaviors. And we cannot combat these reasonings with evidence - the only objections to murder are moral and emotional.
It's not that there are not objections to murder, we simply find that any and all of them are emotional or moral. Attempting to dismiss these types of reasoning as simply not valid due to the idol-worship of the holy and sacred Logic has the same results as the reason we fear an artificially intelligent robotic takeover - nothing but logic will always result in our deaths. The first person to comment on Tyson's tweet makes this point:
This is not the only thing, of course, but it is by far the absolute most important. Indeed, Tyson's proposed Rationalia would devolve in short order into a tyrannical, emotionless murder factory. With no logical reason to not kill other people, we easily find the justification for murder of the physically and mentally disabled. What reason would we have for allowing these logically and rationally inferior people in a purely logical society? When we weigh the pros and cons of allowing those unable or unfit to work and contribute, we will have plenty of evidence showing that their lives are in fact not quite worth as much as the mentally fit and physically capable populace. Surely there would be people opposed to this plan, but unless those people can provide logical evidence that their disabled friends and family could be a benefit to society, they will see them enter the execution room.
There are plenty of reasons to oppose pure emotion in regards to decision making. However, we see that pure logic is in fact deadly. The logic vs. emotion camps have created a false dilemma - these two schools of thought at not at odds with one another. They work in tandem, they exist necessarily side by side. The entire concept of humanity is based on a working relationship between emotion and logic that allows us to see the values of vastly important aspects of life like love and friendship while maintaining the ability to make the best decisions possible - usually for what we hope to be the benefit of our friends and loved ones.
This is what we tend to forget. Even those among us who champion pure logic and reason tend to still find themselves experiencing emotions of all sorts. They have families and loyalties, they create a moral framework for themselves - with or without a higher power to hold them accountable - and they, typically, fall in love. The ones who avoid emotion and relationships tend to come out miserable. The attempts to dislodge emotions from our world and our lives always fail - we either give in or give up.
A world of pure emotion would be chaotic - poor decision making, laws that contradict each other, and rampant and indefensible inequality would result. A world of pure logic would be Hell itself, an utter dystopian nightmare. Any attempts to separate these two aspects of what makes us human is an attempt to sabotage humanity.
People are inclined toward "us vs. them" mentalities. We unconsciously put ourselves into camps, form alliances with those who think like us, and consider those who think the opposite thing to be bad, stupid, or inferior. In its extreme form, you end up with, well, extremists. What happened is that camps of people who thought logic and reason were great further and further separated themselves from everything that wasn't logic and reason. Instead of recognizing the inherent values in both logic and emotion, they saw the damage that pure emotion does and they concluded that emotion is bad. Highly emotional thinkers, valuing their emotional perspectives, were shunned and pushed away from logic by the idea that logic is more important than their emotional conclusions, and found themselves separating further and further from logic. Now we have two extreme camps of people, one who thinks it's okay to disregard emotion and one that thinks it's okay to disregard logic.
They are both dead wrong.
To emphasize, dead wrong.
To further make my point, let's clarify something about evidence based decision making. Here are some straight forward facts about what "evidence" even is:
- Evidence is unbiased.
- Evidence does not make decisions.
- Evidence does not say anything.
- Evidence does not conclude anything.
- Evidence can be incomplete.
- Evidence can be misunderstood.
- Evidence can be misused.
- Evidence can be fabricated.
That's probably enough. Basically, what is being proposed is that people - finite, biased, imperfect and influenceable people - would regard evidence as the only method through which to obtain truth. They would then use that discerned "truth" to make decisions, laws, proposals, changes, and decide who lives and dies.
The problem should be clear, but I'll elaborate. People can misinterpret evidence, indeed, they can even purposefully misrepresent it through sophistical means - as in, purposefully manipulating available evidence to make it appear as they desire, or simply making a compelling enough case for what they want you to believe the evidence shows (when it could easily show otherwise). These "higher thinkers" already do this all the time. A society run by the people specifically showcased in that earlier picture instantly makes this proposed nation sound far more hellish than it does in mere theory.
Furthermore, there is nothing on which to base the conclusions of your evidence without some sort of moral framework. Yes, an evidence-only based system could literally not even exist, as evidential conclusions require bias. People consider bias to be a naughty word, but in reality, our entire world is shaped by biases. We can't conclude anything unless we make inferences - if we had no biases, we could not come to conclusions on anything except for the most basic and obvious of things.
Think of it this way - if you are attempting to discern the likelihood of someone having committed a crime based on the evidence for the crime, unless there is definitive, corroborating video proof, you cannot conclude whether or not they are guilty without bias. You must make that leap from "it is likely/unlikely" to "they are guilty/innocent" using inference - or, biases. If we have an eyewitness testimony, but that person has been shown to lie, has a criminal record or has a strong personal relationship or loyalty to the defense or the prosecution, then we can conclude that their testimony may be biased - it might be fabricated, or simply fake.
We have to use inferences every step of the way through the process of determining the validity of a claim. We prefer witnesses unassociated with the people involved because they are less likely to be biased - this conclusion itself is based off of our biases. A witness associated with the people involved could be unbiased, but due to our own biases, we assume it is likely that they will be biased. If we have evidence showing that the accused was present at the location of the crime, but not necessarily evidence of them committing the crime, we have to use inference to determine whether or not they were just an innocent bystander who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So evidence is clearly not the end all be all of decision making - it requires inference, which is biased by the people making the decisions. In a system where decisions are only based on evidence as seen fit by the people in charge, we are left with a situation in which the only reality is the personal biases of the governing rulers.
So, pretty much the same thing we see in government anyway.
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
What Is a Skeptic
The term skeptic means many things, though one thing of note it is used as is a self-identifying label for people who hold a disbelief for theology and, in some cases, any and all supernatural claims, as well as people who don't believe in metaphysics.
If you're trying to find out more about skeptics, there's always the dictionary.
What's particularly interesting is that a search of merely the term "skeptic" does not first produce a link to a dictionary definition, but The Skeptics Society itself.
Now, I read their brief introduction fully, but I'll admit up front that I didn't read their entire manifesto. Not that I'll be criticizing The Skeptics Society in-depth - and only some of their claims were particularly questionable. Here are just a few bullet points about what it means to be a skeptic, according to a society full of them:
So, basically, what you could expect from a skeptic is someone who doesn't accept a claim without first analyzing it. It's not your final stance on a matter, but the introductory phase - the part right before you formulate your belief, where you find reasons to believe or disbelieve it - or maybe still not know for sure. At the end of the day, "being skeptical" doesn't replace belief or disbelief - it's a separate situation altogether. Realistically, you should move from being skeptical about something toward a concrete belief on the matter - you don't simply stay skeptical forever.
There is nothing particularly anti-theistic about this. Many theists approach religious truth claims similarly, and simply come out believing them to be true instead of untrue. An interesting tidbit that I personally enjoy from this explanation of the nature of a skeptic was the following statement:
Someone should let the vast majority of self-proclaimed atheist skeptics in on this, especially Richard Dawkins, I don't think they've taken it into consideration. Indeed, if you approach something assuming your conclusion, you will be hard pressed to be convinced otherwise even in the face of compelling evidence. I've long held that this attitude is the antithesis to skepticism, and apparently the skeptics agree with me.
Here's one thing I think we can both agree skeptics are not, or at least, should not be:
Not that I have comprehensive evidence, but I'll go ahead and attribute the prevalence of this belief to the unskeptical skeptics that seem to be everywhere, making a bad name for the true skeptics - the ones who immediately dismiss claims and evidence that challenge their previously held beliefs while claiming to champion reason and evidence. Strange, it's almost like there are people who don't truly understand what they claim to believe, making a bad name for beliefs of every kind. Some common ground for people of all beliefs and backgrounds, I suppose.
Moving forward, the skeptics had some more to say about skepticism:
Even more stuff I agree with, maybe I'm actually a skeptic myself. Who knew.
Truly, the position of pure skepticism is, to be blunt, laughable. You cannot earnestly believe nothing but skepticism - there must be a foundational truth, or else you have no basis to believe anything, even that you can't believe anything. It's self defeating - if you believe that you can't believe anything, well, you've just believed something. Sorry!
So far, The Skeptics Society has done nothing but agree with me. However, a few things did come up that maybe they should have analyzed further...
While perhaps this is merely the brief and forward explanation and not the full scope of their position, it's not particularly agreeable. See, we do not only know things through the scientific method. Yes, I'm aware they did not say "we can only know things through the scientific method," but it fails dramatically to realize that there are many things we know to be true that can absolutely not be proven through the scientific method. The scientific method specifically involves things like the ability to reproduce a test, producing the same results over and over again to ensure that they are verified through testing, and having the thing to be tested exist in some sort of tangible way that allows us to actively experiment on it in real time.
The scientific method cannot be used to test the validity of things outside of natural, testable causes - specifically the (genuinely) supernatural and metaphysical. Some drastic "skeptics" and atheists will take this to mean that therefore these things do not exist. This is not how that works - absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is reasonable to be skeptical of these things for the lack of evidence, but declaring them to be entirely false due to not being scientifically testable is ignorant - you cannot know that through science alone. The Skeptics Society doesn't seem to have particularly made this claim (that I know of), but again, many self-proclaimed skeptics do.
Indeed, the scientific method cannot be used to test many other things - things that only happened once, for instance, i.e., history. There is a branch of science that investigates these claims, but it is called "historical science," and includes "forensic science," and it does not - because it cannot - utilize the scientific method.
If skeptics truly only utilize the scientific method for the purpose of understanding truth, then they will never be able to know historical truths - indeed not even historical truths that they themselves experienced. These experiences were not tested with the scientific method, so without accepting that there are other ways to know truth, they would have to conclude that these events have yet to be proven due to a lack of scientific evidence. It would be just as silly as having skepticism be your only position. Disbelieving all of history due to history not being able to be verified using the scientific method sounds a little silly, yes?
Most notably, science also cannot prove itself. Quite interestingly, science is a marvelous tool, but its validity cannot be tested by its own standards. This is not quite self-defeating unless you were to phrase it in a manner like, "science is the only way to truth." While The Skeptics Society has not done this (merely stated that science is the best way), I have seen self-proclaimed skeptics do it many times. Science surely is a manner of discovering truth, but to claim it to be the only way to truth is self-defeating, as it cannot prove itself. This brings to light the fact that we know science to be a way to truth due to other means of reasoning - mainly and most importantly, philosophy.
Science is a slave to philosophy. Without philosophy, we could not know whether or not science was a valid manner of understanding truth. We use philosophical principles when we establish the validity of science - particularly causality.
What is being said here is that causality is understood to be true in so basic a form that it is not actually proven by anything. It simply is - we know it is because it is so clearly true. It is a law of the universe, part of reality, and understandable through simply living day to day. The scientific method would be hard pressed to provide proof of the law of causality when it, in fact, depends on the law of causality. Without the law of causality, we couldn't prove anything, as science is the study of causes and effects.
The basic laws of the universe, including logic, are not proven by the scientific method - but we know they are true. There are other ways of knowing things other than the scientific method, and to base whether or not you will believe something only on whether or not it is scientifically provable literally ignores this reality.
The Skeptics Society doesn't ignore causality:
Of course, they still fail to connect the dots between science depending on causality without being able to prove it. This statement confirms that causality is important - and real - but doesn't mention anything about how it cannot be known through science. While it's possible these, perhaps more "advanced," ideas are being skipped over for the sake of a simplistic and straight forward introduction for newcomers, given my own prior interactions with and understanding of the behaviors and attitudes of skeptics, I am somewhat... skeptical.
The Skeptics Society also noted:
This claim is not quite as controversial as the previous one, but I still felt it required attention. See, the fault of this statement falls from the use of the word "factual." This statement attempts to say that claims become actual fact once an amount of evidence has been produced that make the claim appear reasonable enough that people tend to agree on it. This is simply not how that works. If something is shown to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, it is not always definitively true for the same reasons that a lack of evidence or lack of enough compelling evidence doesn't make something definitively false. See, while we can know things, we cannot know everything, and we indeed cannot know the vast majority of things for certain. There could be evidence in the future that challenges what we think is true, or we could find that previous evidence was faulty or misled.
For example, it's entirely reasonable to believe that everything is affected by gravity. However, we have not witnessed all things falling and being subjected to gravity. We are therefore merely inferring through previously understood data that it is most likely that everything does indeed fall and everything is indeed subject to gravity. We, however, cannot know for an absolute fact, as we haven't tested literally all things falling, and we never can. While gravity is proven beyond a reasonable doubt and there is no evidence against gravity, we have not proven through the scientific method that all things are certainly and unarguably affected by gravity. Perhaps there is a thing that is not that we haven't discovered, or perhaps there will be a thing in the future that is not, but we cannot know this. It does, however, seem very unlikely. We therefore have concluded that gravity is likely beyond a reasonable doubt - perhaps 99.999...% likely, but not 100%.
Perhaps it is just my opinion, then, but we can only know that things are very likely to be true, not necessarily that they are true. Now, I'm not saying I don't believe in truth - to the contrary, I very much believe that there is absolute truth. But we are finite - rather small, insignificant, and truly unable to fully comprehend all that there is to comprehend in our vast and fascinating universe. Whether we know a truth doesn't change what the truth is - what I contest is merely our ability to know the truth without any doubt - absolutely zero doubt is hard to justify for a large number of truth claims - scientific truth claims overwhelmingly included.
And, of course, I found fault with the following statement...
I would wonder when this manifesto was written - because surely it was after the overwhelming evidence for a beginning of the universe from Einstein's Theory of Relativity to the Big Bang and everything in between. Surely they are not unaware of the absolutely vast amount of evidence that points to a Creator and the mountains of evidence that lie contrary to Darwin's theory of evolution, as explored previously. I question if the skeptics are not violating their own standards: Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true.
As stated previously, we cannot know definitely that something is true or false. If new evidence comes up, we must be open to the possibility that it proves or disproves something that we held to be true or false previously. Creationists were skittish in the past toward the idea of using science to back up their beliefs, but as we have seen recently, there is no reason for theism to be afraid of science - it actually tends to point toward a Creator more often than not.
My biggest criticism of skeptics and perhaps-not-so-skeptics is their assumption of naturalism and materialism, ruling out the possibility of any other explanation. While The Skeptics Society appeared to not believe in doing this, they show themselves to in fact be guilty of the same. Quite disappointing.
When I read something, I leave myself open to the possibility that it may have evidence that is contrary to my beliefs. When I read a clickbait article title proclaiming that science has just "definitively disproven God," or "new evidence strikes devastating blow against God," I give it the chance to make its case. It's always been a case of assuming their conclusion or a misunderstanding of what kind of evidence would actually be needed to disprove God, but regardless, I understand and accept that if evidence were found that truly did falsify Christian doctrine or disprove God, I would have to accept the reality of the evidence.
It is irrational to believe anything other than the truth. What the truth is, however, is up for debate, due to the very nature of how we find out what the truth truly is. I've found that the evidence for God is overwhelming, that not only does science more often point to a Creator than to naturalism, but every other facet of philosophy, logic, history, and every other aspect of human existence does as well. I find it is more reasonable to believe in the truth claims of Christianity than materialism. If this was not the truth, it would not matter how reasonable it seemed - perhaps the truth is unreasonable, who knows. In the same regard, if Christianity is true, then materialism would not be - no matter how reasonable you believed it to be.
The Skeptics Society finishes their brief introduction with some excerpts from a book by Shermer, Michael, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. Here are a few parts with some of my own comments.
While there is nothing particularly to debate here, it's of interesting note that while a short jaunt through science may lead one to atheism, an in-depth analysis is unlikely to leave one there without a good, heavy dose of denial.
Our analysis of The Skeptics Society will end with their own definition of a skeptic. If the society of skeptics define what the modern movement of skepticism is supposed to be about, then it is reasonable that this is a reliable definition. This is what we will analyze further:
This definition is... disappointing. This self-definition unmistakably confirms the suspicious I had earlier: skeptics put too much emphasis on the scientific method as being the only way of knowing truth. More information is required to understand how I came to this conclusion, as they have made their own definitions for some of these words.
Here, they define "being rational" as basing conclusions on the scientific method - this is highly unsatisfactory, as philosophy and logic are truly the backbone of rationalism, while science is actually a product of rationalism. The act of basing conclusions on evidence as shown by the scientific method requires logic and reason, it is not possible to do so without it. Otherwise you merely have the results of scientific studies, without conclusions. Rationalism can and does exist independently from science, while science depends on rationalism. This explanation of "science leading to rationalism" is essentially entirely backwards. Rationalism leads to science - it wouldn't exist without it.
They also clearly state their opinion that science is the most effective tool for understanding cause and effect. This asserts that science has been developed as a method of understanding causality - but it is not. We understand causality separate from science, as well. Science depends on causality - without it, science is meaningless. We have to understand causality before we can utilize science - without understanding that causes have effects and effects have causes, the results of scientific studies will not make sense to us.
While The Skeptics Society started out strong, the conclusions and definitions they have come up with have proven disappointing. They place too much emphasis on the scientific method while ignoring that philosophy and logic are actually the real ways that we understand the world around us - and science is a product of these methods. Science is a marvelous tool, but it doesn't exist independently of philosophy and logic. I don't feel like their failure to mention these realities was done as a way to keep from confusing newcomers - it appears to truly be ignorance. The skeptics have failed to establish the very basis of logic and reason as their methods of truth, defaulting to the incomplete and unsatisfactory position of "science always and science only," which, I'll remind us, is self-defeating - science can't prove itself, let alone prove that it is the "best" way of finding truth.
Now that we're done with our analysis of The Skeptic Society, we have a few conclusions. While skeptics claim to approach claims in an unbiased manner, there are perhaps some theories they have dismissed outright and refuse to approach new evidence for with the same unbiased attitude. Skeptics laud the scientific method as the best way of finding truth, not so much as even acknowledging science's dependence on philosophy and logic to even exist. While anyone of any belief can be a skeptic, there is undeniably a culture around it that insinuates the majority of them believe that a skeptic approach using science and critical thinking will result in certain uniform beliefs.
Unfortunately, a lot of these conclusions coincide with my previous assumptions. I was hoping perhaps I'd find that the internet not-so-skeptics were operating under false assumptions and simply misunderstanding what it meant to be a skeptic - but if The Skeptic Society espouses these beliefs, then they are operating on the same level.
Skeptics truly believe that science is the one true way to truth - a sad, shallow, and misguided view of the world. The scientific method is a great tool and it helps us understand a lot, but championing it as, essentially, The Way, is a failure to draw reason and rationalism to their full conclusions. Basically, when you stop at "science" as the way to truth, you have stopped short - you need to go deeper. Science doesn't show truth, it never has - we've always utilized principles like causality and employed logic and reason in interpreting and understanding scientific results.
To truly be skeptic would be to approach new evidence for something you previously found to be false with the same unbiased attitudes as you would a completely new claim. If a self-proclaimed skeptic comes across evidence that is at odds with evolution, they shouldn't disregard it. They don't have to change their opinion overnight, but they shouldn't be at the same place they were previously. Sure, some evidence can be found to be misguided or conclusions can be inferred incorrectly, but simply proclaiming that all opposing evidence is in fact misguided is not being a skeptic. Adhering unwaveringly to your previous beliefs does not employ skepticism.
Self-proclaimed skeptics tend to fail to live up to their own standards of skepticism.
If you're trying to find out more about skeptics, there's always the dictionary.
1. a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual.
2. a person who maintains a doubting attitude, as toward values, plans, statements, or the character of others.
3. a person who doubts the truth of a religion, especially Christianity, or of important elements of it.
4. (initial capital letter) Philosophy.
1. a member of a philosophical school of ancient Greece, the earliest group of which consisted of Pyrrho and his followers, who maintained that real knowledge of things is impossible.
2. any later thinker who doubts or questions the possibility of real knowledge of any kind.
What's particularly interesting is that a search of merely the term "skeptic" does not first produce a link to a dictionary definition, but The Skeptics Society itself.
The Skeptics Society is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) scientific and educational organization whose mission is to engage leading experts in investigating the paranormal, fringe science, pseudoscience, and extraordinary claims of all kinds, promote critical thinking, and serve as an educational tool for those seeking a sound scientific viewpoint. Our contributors—leading scientists, scholars, investigative journalists, historians, professors and teachers—are top experts in their fields. It is our hope that our efforts go a long way in promoting critical thinking and lifelong inquisitiveness in all individuals.
Now, I read their brief introduction fully, but I'll admit up front that I didn't read their entire manifesto. Not that I'll be criticizing The Skeptics Society in-depth - and only some of their claims were particularly questionable. Here are just a few bullet points about what it means to be a skeptic, according to a society full of them:
- Skepticism is a provisional approach to claims.
- It is the application of reason to any and all ideas.
- Skepticism is a method, not a position.
- We must see compelling evidence before we believe.
So, basically, what you could expect from a skeptic is someone who doesn't accept a claim without first analyzing it. It's not your final stance on a matter, but the introductory phase - the part right before you formulate your belief, where you find reasons to believe or disbelieve it - or maybe still not know for sure. At the end of the day, "being skeptical" doesn't replace belief or disbelief - it's a separate situation altogether. Realistically, you should move from being skeptical about something toward a concrete belief on the matter - you don't simply stay skeptical forever.
There is nothing particularly anti-theistic about this. Many theists approach religious truth claims similarly, and simply come out believing them to be true instead of untrue. An interesting tidbit that I personally enjoy from this explanation of the nature of a skeptic was the following statement:
Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true.
Someone should let the vast majority of self-proclaimed atheist skeptics in on this, especially Richard Dawkins, I don't think they've taken it into consideration. Indeed, if you approach something assuming your conclusion, you will be hard pressed to be convinced otherwise even in the face of compelling evidence. I've long held that this attitude is the antithesis to skepticism, and apparently the skeptics agree with me.
Here's one thing I think we can both agree skeptics are not, or at least, should not be:
Some people believe that skepticism is the rejection of new ideas, or worse, they confuse “skeptic” with “cynic” and think that skeptics are a bunch of grumpy curmudgeons unwilling to accept any claim that challenges the status quo.
Not that I have comprehensive evidence, but I'll go ahead and attribute the prevalence of this belief to the unskeptical skeptics that seem to be everywhere, making a bad name for the true skeptics - the ones who immediately dismiss claims and evidence that challenge their previously held beliefs while claiming to champion reason and evidence. Strange, it's almost like there are people who don't truly understand what they claim to believe, making a bad name for beliefs of every kind. Some common ground for people of all beliefs and backgrounds, I suppose.
Moving forward, the skeptics had some more to say about skepticism:
Skepticism has a long historical tradition dating back to ancient Greece, when Socrates observed: “All I know is that I know nothing.” But this pure position is sterile and unproductive and held by virtually no one. If you were skeptical about everything, you would have to be skeptical of your own skepticism.
Even more stuff I agree with, maybe I'm actually a skeptic myself. Who knew.
Truly, the position of pure skepticism is, to be blunt, laughable. You cannot earnestly believe nothing but skepticism - there must be a foundational truth, or else you have no basis to believe anything, even that you can't believe anything. It's self defeating - if you believe that you can't believe anything, well, you've just believed something. Sorry!
So far, The Skeptics Society has done nothing but agree with me. However, a few things did come up that maybe they should have analyzed further...
Modern skepticism is embodied in the scientific method, which involves gathering data to formulate and test naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena.
While perhaps this is merely the brief and forward explanation and not the full scope of their position, it's not particularly agreeable. See, we do not only know things through the scientific method. Yes, I'm aware they did not say "we can only know things through the scientific method," but it fails dramatically to realize that there are many things we know to be true that can absolutely not be proven through the scientific method. The scientific method specifically involves things like the ability to reproduce a test, producing the same results over and over again to ensure that they are verified through testing, and having the thing to be tested exist in some sort of tangible way that allows us to actively experiment on it in real time.
The scientific method cannot be used to test the validity of things outside of natural, testable causes - specifically the (genuinely) supernatural and metaphysical. Some drastic "skeptics" and atheists will take this to mean that therefore these things do not exist. This is not how that works - absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is reasonable to be skeptical of these things for the lack of evidence, but declaring them to be entirely false due to not being scientifically testable is ignorant - you cannot know that through science alone. The Skeptics Society doesn't seem to have particularly made this claim (that I know of), but again, many self-proclaimed skeptics do.
Indeed, the scientific method cannot be used to test many other things - things that only happened once, for instance, i.e., history. There is a branch of science that investigates these claims, but it is called "historical science," and includes "forensic science," and it does not - because it cannot - utilize the scientific method.
If skeptics truly only utilize the scientific method for the purpose of understanding truth, then they will never be able to know historical truths - indeed not even historical truths that they themselves experienced. These experiences were not tested with the scientific method, so without accepting that there are other ways to know truth, they would have to conclude that these events have yet to be proven due to a lack of scientific evidence. It would be just as silly as having skepticism be your only position. Disbelieving all of history due to history not being able to be verified using the scientific method sounds a little silly, yes?
Most notably, science also cannot prove itself. Quite interestingly, science is a marvelous tool, but its validity cannot be tested by its own standards. This is not quite self-defeating unless you were to phrase it in a manner like, "science is the only way to truth." While The Skeptics Society has not done this (merely stated that science is the best way), I have seen self-proclaimed skeptics do it many times. Science surely is a manner of discovering truth, but to claim it to be the only way to truth is self-defeating, as it cannot prove itself. This brings to light the fact that we know science to be a way to truth due to other means of reasoning - mainly and most importantly, philosophy.
Science is a slave to philosophy. Without philosophy, we could not know whether or not science was a valid manner of understanding truth. We use philosophical principles when we establish the validity of science - particularly causality.
Causality is an abstraction that indicates how the world progresses, so basic a concept that it is more apt as an explanation of other concepts of progression than as something to be explained by others more basic. The concept is like those of agency and efficacy. For this reason, a leap of intuition may be needed to grasp it. Accordingly, causality is built into the conceptual structure of ordinary language.
What is being said here is that causality is understood to be true in so basic a form that it is not actually proven by anything. It simply is - we know it is because it is so clearly true. It is a law of the universe, part of reality, and understandable through simply living day to day. The scientific method would be hard pressed to provide proof of the law of causality when it, in fact, depends on the law of causality. Without the law of causality, we couldn't prove anything, as science is the study of causes and effects.
The basic laws of the universe, including logic, are not proven by the scientific method - but we know they are true. There are other ways of knowing things other than the scientific method, and to base whether or not you will believe something only on whether or not it is scientifically provable literally ignores this reality.
The Skeptics Society doesn't ignore causality:
Science is the best method humankind has devised for understanding causality. Therefore the scientific method is our most effective tool for understanding the causes of the effects we are confronted with in our personal lives as well as in nature.
Of course, they still fail to connect the dots between science depending on causality without being able to prove it. This statement confirms that causality is important - and real - but doesn't mention anything about how it cannot be known through science. While it's possible these, perhaps more "advanced," ideas are being skipped over for the sake of a simplistic and straight forward introduction for newcomers, given my own prior interactions with and understanding of the behaviors and attitudes of skeptics, I am somewhat... skeptical.
The Skeptics Society also noted:
A claim becomes factual when it is confirmed to such an extent it would be reasonable to offer temporary agreement.
This claim is not quite as controversial as the previous one, but I still felt it required attention. See, the fault of this statement falls from the use of the word "factual." This statement attempts to say that claims become actual fact once an amount of evidence has been produced that make the claim appear reasonable enough that people tend to agree on it. This is simply not how that works. If something is shown to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, it is not always definitively true for the same reasons that a lack of evidence or lack of enough compelling evidence doesn't make something definitively false. See, while we can know things, we cannot know everything, and we indeed cannot know the vast majority of things for certain. There could be evidence in the future that challenges what we think is true, or we could find that previous evidence was faulty or misled.
For example, it's entirely reasonable to believe that everything is affected by gravity. However, we have not witnessed all things falling and being subjected to gravity. We are therefore merely inferring through previously understood data that it is most likely that everything does indeed fall and everything is indeed subject to gravity. We, however, cannot know for an absolute fact, as we haven't tested literally all things falling, and we never can. While gravity is proven beyond a reasonable doubt and there is no evidence against gravity, we have not proven through the scientific method that all things are certainly and unarguably affected by gravity. Perhaps there is a thing that is not that we haven't discovered, or perhaps there will be a thing in the future that is not, but we cannot know this. It does, however, seem very unlikely. We therefore have concluded that gravity is likely beyond a reasonable doubt - perhaps 99.999...% likely, but not 100%.
Perhaps it is just my opinion, then, but we can only know that things are very likely to be true, not necessarily that they are true. Now, I'm not saying I don't believe in truth - to the contrary, I very much believe that there is absolute truth. But we are finite - rather small, insignificant, and truly unable to fully comprehend all that there is to comprehend in our vast and fascinating universe. Whether we know a truth doesn't change what the truth is - what I contest is merely our ability to know the truth without any doubt - absolutely zero doubt is hard to justify for a large number of truth claims - scientific truth claims overwhelmingly included.
And, of course, I found fault with the following statement...
Some claims, such as water dowsing, ESP, and creationism, have been tested (and failed the tests) often enough that we can provisionally conclude that they are not valid.
I would wonder when this manifesto was written - because surely it was after the overwhelming evidence for a beginning of the universe from Einstein's Theory of Relativity to the Big Bang and everything in between. Surely they are not unaware of the absolutely vast amount of evidence that points to a Creator and the mountains of evidence that lie contrary to Darwin's theory of evolution, as explored previously. I question if the skeptics are not violating their own standards: Ideally, skeptics do not go into an investigation closed to the possibility that a phenomenon might be real or that a claim might be true.
As stated previously, we cannot know definitely that something is true or false. If new evidence comes up, we must be open to the possibility that it proves or disproves something that we held to be true or false previously. Creationists were skittish in the past toward the idea of using science to back up their beliefs, but as we have seen recently, there is no reason for theism to be afraid of science - it actually tends to point toward a Creator more often than not.
My biggest criticism of skeptics and perhaps-not-so-skeptics is their assumption of naturalism and materialism, ruling out the possibility of any other explanation. While The Skeptics Society appeared to not believe in doing this, they show themselves to in fact be guilty of the same. Quite disappointing.
When I read something, I leave myself open to the possibility that it may have evidence that is contrary to my beliefs. When I read a clickbait article title proclaiming that science has just "definitively disproven God," or "new evidence strikes devastating blow against God," I give it the chance to make its case. It's always been a case of assuming their conclusion or a misunderstanding of what kind of evidence would actually be needed to disprove God, but regardless, I understand and accept that if evidence were found that truly did falsify Christian doctrine or disprove God, I would have to accept the reality of the evidence.
It is irrational to believe anything other than the truth. What the truth is, however, is up for debate, due to the very nature of how we find out what the truth truly is. I've found that the evidence for God is overwhelming, that not only does science more often point to a Creator than to naturalism, but every other facet of philosophy, logic, history, and every other aspect of human existence does as well. I find it is more reasonable to believe in the truth claims of Christianity than materialism. If this was not the truth, it would not matter how reasonable it seemed - perhaps the truth is unreasonable, who knows. In the same regard, if Christianity is true, then materialism would not be - no matter how reasonable you believed it to be.
The Skeptics Society finishes their brief introduction with some excerpts from a book by Shermer, Michael, How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God. Here are a few parts with some of my own comments.
In fact, at least two of our more prominent supporters...are believers in God. Other members of our board may believe in God as well. I do not know. I have never asked.This quote shows that The Skeptics Society has theists, or least proponents of intelligent design (which is not traditional creationism). This is not surprising, as I've stated and from my own experience and feelings on the matter, there is nothing anti-theistic about true skepticism. Indeed, true skepticism has just as much a chance to lead one to God as it does to naturalism, depending on the biases, interpretations, and influences of the person investigating the claims. I question the contradictory statements within just this brief about page, especially in the face of understanding that religious people can also be 'skeptics'.
This is, of course, interesting. Theists, creationists, and apologists have been presenting their comprehensive and compelling evidence for a Creator for many years. It's so bizarre to me how people have either managed to avoid this evidence their entire lives - I was only able to avoid it for 26 years - or just decided to volitionally disregard it. They are either unaware of the evidence, unreasonably declaring the evidence insufficient due to their own personal commitments to materialism, or they lack an understanding in philosophy and logic.
The primary mission of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine is the investigation of science and pseudoscience controversies, and the promotion of critical thinking. ... If someone says he believes in God and he can prove it through rational arguments or empirical evidence, then, like Harry Truman, we say “show me.”
If in the process of learning how to think scientifically and critically, someone comes to the conclusion that there is no God, so be it—but it is not our goal to convert believers into nonbelievers.”
While there is nothing particularly to debate here, it's of interesting note that while a short jaunt through science may lead one to atheism, an in-depth analysis is unlikely to leave one there without a good, heavy dose of denial.
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
― Werner Heisenberg
Our analysis of The Skeptics Society will end with their own definition of a skeptic. If the society of skeptics define what the modern movement of skepticism is supposed to be about, then it is reasonable that this is a reliable definition. This is what we will analyze further:
It is also important to remember that dictionaries do not give definitions; they give usages. ... But these usages leave out one important component: the goal of reason and rationality. The ultimate end to thinking is to understand cause-and-effect relationships in the world around us. The goal is to know the universe, the world, and ourselves. Since rationality is the most reliable means of thinking, a rational skeptic may be defined as:
One who questions the validity of particular claims of knowledge by employing or calling for statements of fact to prove or disprove claims, as a tool for understanding causality.
This definition is... disappointing. This self-definition unmistakably confirms the suspicious I had earlier: skeptics put too much emphasis on the scientific method as being the only way of knowing truth. More information is required to understand how I came to this conclusion, as they have made their own definitions for some of these words.
Science leads us toward rationalism: the basing of conclusions on the scientific method.
Science is the best method humankind has devised for understanding causality. Therefore the scientific method is our most effective tool for understanding the causes of the effects we are confronted with in our personal lives as well as in nature.
Here, they define "being rational" as basing conclusions on the scientific method - this is highly unsatisfactory, as philosophy and logic are truly the backbone of rationalism, while science is actually a product of rationalism. The act of basing conclusions on evidence as shown by the scientific method requires logic and reason, it is not possible to do so without it. Otherwise you merely have the results of scientific studies, without conclusions. Rationalism can and does exist independently from science, while science depends on rationalism. This explanation of "science leading to rationalism" is essentially entirely backwards. Rationalism leads to science - it wouldn't exist without it.
They also clearly state their opinion that science is the most effective tool for understanding cause and effect. This asserts that science has been developed as a method of understanding causality - but it is not. We understand causality separate from science, as well. Science depends on causality - without it, science is meaningless. We have to understand causality before we can utilize science - without understanding that causes have effects and effects have causes, the results of scientific studies will not make sense to us.
While The Skeptics Society started out strong, the conclusions and definitions they have come up with have proven disappointing. They place too much emphasis on the scientific method while ignoring that philosophy and logic are actually the real ways that we understand the world around us - and science is a product of these methods. Science is a marvelous tool, but it doesn't exist independently of philosophy and logic. I don't feel like their failure to mention these realities was done as a way to keep from confusing newcomers - it appears to truly be ignorance. The skeptics have failed to establish the very basis of logic and reason as their methods of truth, defaulting to the incomplete and unsatisfactory position of "science always and science only," which, I'll remind us, is self-defeating - science can't prove itself, let alone prove that it is the "best" way of finding truth.
Now that we're done with our analysis of The Skeptic Society, we have a few conclusions. While skeptics claim to approach claims in an unbiased manner, there are perhaps some theories they have dismissed outright and refuse to approach new evidence for with the same unbiased attitude. Skeptics laud the scientific method as the best way of finding truth, not so much as even acknowledging science's dependence on philosophy and logic to even exist. While anyone of any belief can be a skeptic, there is undeniably a culture around it that insinuates the majority of them believe that a skeptic approach using science and critical thinking will result in certain uniform beliefs.
Unfortunately, a lot of these conclusions coincide with my previous assumptions. I was hoping perhaps I'd find that the internet not-so-skeptics were operating under false assumptions and simply misunderstanding what it meant to be a skeptic - but if The Skeptic Society espouses these beliefs, then they are operating on the same level.
Skeptics truly believe that science is the one true way to truth - a sad, shallow, and misguided view of the world. The scientific method is a great tool and it helps us understand a lot, but championing it as, essentially, The Way, is a failure to draw reason and rationalism to their full conclusions. Basically, when you stop at "science" as the way to truth, you have stopped short - you need to go deeper. Science doesn't show truth, it never has - we've always utilized principles like causality and employed logic and reason in interpreting and understanding scientific results.
To truly be skeptic would be to approach new evidence for something you previously found to be false with the same unbiased attitudes as you would a completely new claim. If a self-proclaimed skeptic comes across evidence that is at odds with evolution, they shouldn't disregard it. They don't have to change their opinion overnight, but they shouldn't be at the same place they were previously. Sure, some evidence can be found to be misguided or conclusions can be inferred incorrectly, but simply proclaiming that all opposing evidence is in fact misguided is not being a skeptic. Adhering unwaveringly to your previous beliefs does not employ skepticism.
Self-proclaimed skeptics tend to fail to live up to their own standards of skepticism.
"One who claims to be a skeptic of one set of beliefs is actually a true believer in another set of beliefs."
- Phillip E. Johnson
Monday, June 27, 2016
Ideas Have Consequences (Abortion)
The debate surrounding abortion is defined in different ways by different people. Very generally speaking:
Proponents of abortion refer to it as "health care," "women's rights," "reproductive rights," etc. They claim that opponents of abortion are infringing on "basic health care rights," "women's right to choose," etc., some going so far as to claim that abortion opponents literally just hate women and/or are "forcing them to have children," etc.
Opponents of abortion refer to abortion as murder and consider their fight to be for the protection of human life. They generally believe that proponents of abortion are not simply "making a choice," but actually taking the fate of innocent human lives into their own hands, deciding who will live and who will die.
What is most peculiar is that both of these sides debate using these types of rhetoric in the same arguments, and it appears like neither of them really understands what the other side actually thinks. An opponent of abortion can make a statement that they are against the murder of unborn lives, and someone will retort that that person is against women's health care. If you actually pay attention to these debates, it seems absolutely ludicrous.
One side uses words and phrases in an attempt to make abortion seem as innocuous and normal as possible, referring to it as a normal health care procedure, while the other focuses on the question of morality and the realities of the human lives being affected.
One side is employing deception, while the other is often accused of emotional manipulation or the like.
Now, proponents of abortion have come up with various arguments to combat the concerns of abortion opponents in various ways, but abortion opponents actually haven't had to change their own arguments. This is because, at the end of the day, abortion is a disagreement on a moral issue, that issue being, essentially, is it morally acceptable for a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy through medical intervention? Will we, as a society, allow this practice to occur legally?
This is not something "science" can answer. This is not something that can be answered by statistics or mob rule opinion - it is through and through a moral, and to a lesser extent societal, issue.
Abortion supporters attempt to circumvent this reality by bringing science and health care terms into the equation, but it only serves to divert attention from the reality of the question.
The fact of the matter is, no one isn't sure whether or not the "clump of cells" inside of a woman's body will turn into a human being if it is allowed to mature and be born.
The fact of the matter is, no one is unclear about whether or not sexual activity can lead to pregnancy.
The fact of the matter is, no one is unclear about what "pregnancy" actually means.
What has happened is an attempt to divert attention from these obvious realities and "reeducate" people about what's "really" the question at hand.
To a person who views abortion as a moral question and personally finds that their answer to that question is a resounding "no," these rhetoric attempts at redefining "life," "health care," and "rights," is actually completely repugnant. It can be very difficult to genuinely attempt to see eye to eye with someone who, in their minds, is literally advocating the murder of innocent human lives. This is something abortion proponents either don't understand or choose to ignore.
Proponents of abortion typically have been taught that a fetus is not a "life" (or not a life until x amount of time) and therefore it's not wrong to remove it for any reason, or any specific variety of reasons. There are extreme abortion supporters who do actually concede that the life inside of a woman is a human life, but insist that it is actually simply morally okay for a woman to make the choice to take that human life if she desires. It is nearly impossible to make ground with these latter people, but the abortion supporters who simply don't believe that an unborn human is still a life - or they haven't come to the conscious conclusion as to what that fetus being a life actually means - are a bit easier on the stomach.
What has happened is that the abortion proponent rhetoric has caused these people to disassociate the obvious realities of how people are made with what abortion is.
When we find out the answer to our childhood question of "where do babies come from," the natural conclusion that will be made by most people is that the thing inside of a pregnant woman will come out and become a person. This is the point at which people will either carry on with the obvious reality that the pregnant woman has a human life inside of her, or the person will be reeducated and taught that that life is not, in fact, human, until an arbitrary period of time, or just whenever it comes out. Without taking any time to think further into this explanation, a person will generally accept that abortion is therefore okay.
What is important to note here is that the natural reaction of children is that a pregnant woman has another child inside of her, a child like them. They realize that that is how they came into this world, and knowing that they are in fact alive, they attribute those characteristics naturally to the life inside of the pregnant woman. My nephews do not question whether or not their cousin inside of me is a human life, they know that it is their cousin and that they will have to wait a few more months to meet him. They did not ask whether or not their cousin was a human yet, or how long until he's alive - they ask how long until he's born. They know he will be born and come out into this world as a baby human life, but for now he's still developing.
It is from this position that another person will attempt to reeducate this child and inform them that what they believe to be a human life is actually not - either not until x amount of weeks/months, or not until the baby comes out. Any further questioning will usually result in an explanation that the baby isn't a person until it comes out because while inside it's still "a clump of cells," or similar rhetoric.
The problem is, the people campaigning these viewpoints have generally never had a child. There are of course pro-abortion mothers, but it's hard to see how this position could be from anything other than cognitive dissonance.
I was formerly a proponent of abortion due to the deceptive rhetoric of "women's rights," and "it's just a clump of cells." The problem with these explanations are that they either tiptoe around the issue or just flat out tell a lie.
A developing human baby inside of a woman is no more a clump of cells than we all are. What do you actually believe happens inside of a pregnant woman? You don't have to go to a politically motivated website to find the reality of how a child develops. It has never been more clear to me than it became after I've actually been pregnant.
If something that moves and kicks - as in, with legs - after mere weeks is a "clump of cells," then we all are.
After the deceptive rhetoric melted away and I saw the reality that the developing fetus is in no unclear terms an actual human life, the first feeling was in fact of guilt. A strong feeling of guilt for espousing the belief that it was okay to murder people merely because they were still inside of another person, and a strong feeling of embarrassment. It was embarrassing to realize that I had essentially been tricked - and being tricked makes you feel stupid.
It's hard to get a true believer in abortion, or any issue, to open their eyes for this reason - the human mind knows that it will feel a great deal of embarrassment when it is shown to have held a false belief. We don't enjoy the feeling of realizing we've been wrong, sudden flashbacks to all of the arguments we had, remembering the things that we argued and realizing how misled and wrong they were - and how right those other people had been all along. It's not easy, and many people would instead feel compelled to dig themselves deeper into the rhetoric, swallow more of the lies, and nestle safely in their misguided world views rather than face the reality that they were, bluntly, stupid.
I was very stupid. I cannot feel any more guilty than I feel when my unborn son reacts to light and sound inside of me. I cannot feel any more guilty about how I used to believe that lives like his were disposable for the sake of convenience. I feel disgusted with myself for ever thinking that way.
I remember getting frustrated reading the opinions of people who genuinely believed it was okay to terminate a developing human life merely because you are inconvenienced by it before I was pregnant - and that is not a strawman. There are people who will concede that an unborn baby is a human life - mostly because it is unavoidable reality - but still choose to believe that it is okay to terminate that life. Now that I've come to realize the reality of a fetus' life, I cannot even stand it - the way it makes me feel can't be adequately described. The closest word to the experience would be heartbreaking. A close second is revulsion.
It is heartbreaking to see someone champion so fervently a view that is literally murder - it is literally the view that one life is more valuable than another, so much more valuable that that person should have the moral authority over whether or not that other life can be murdered. These are the same types of views espoused by people who believe in eugenics and ethnic cleansing - that it is okay to eliminate certain lives for our convenience and "benefit."
As long as their cognitive dissonance keeps them from realizing that this view is advocating murder, they will never realize that their world view is causing real harm to human lives. The abortion advocates who don't seem to care if who they kill is alive or not do not lose quite as much as the innocents who were stripped of their personhood and murdered without a voice.
Ideas have consequences - and innocent people are the victims of this world view.
It is less emotionally devastating to read the viewpoints of people who have simply not recognized the realities of what life is. These viewpoints don't thrive on cognitive dissonance so much as a failure to draw ideas to their full conclusions. People who believe it's okay to have an abortion before x amount of weeks or that it's only okay to have an abortion under certain circumstances have yet to fully actualize their views.
Why is it okay to terminate a pregnancy when it is only six weeks along? Why not eight? Is a second trimester abortion okay? What makes a first trimester abortion okay, but not a second trimester abortion?
It is all arbitrary. You cannot choose a magical benchmark point of development. If an abortion is not okay at six weeks, that means that you are conceding that the unborn baby is indeed a life that should not be able to be terminated, and you've merely attached an arbitrary benchmark length of time for when it is or is not a life. If it is a life at six weeks, it's a life at one day - it is impossible to argue otherwise. You must then agree that if the baby was not aborted before six weeks, it would have continued to develop past six weeks - thus magically becoming a life worthy of protecting. If it will "become" a life in six weeks, what was it before then? It was not something different just because it was sooner - it was still a life before six weeks. If it's a life when it comes out, it's a life when it's inside. It could not be otherwise - our basic logical understandings of reality point to this conclusion. If we see an oak tree, we know it was once an acorn. If we see a cooked beefsteak, we know it used to be an uncooked beefsteak - and before then, part of a cow. What else could it possibly have been? This is the law of continuity, and when we remove this obvious reality from human lives, we are betraying logic and reason.
You cannot reconcile the belief that it is okay to terminate a pregnancy only because of specific reasons, not including convenience, with the reasoning as to why it is not okay to terminate a pregnancy merely for convenience. What is truly the difference? If you concede that a woman shouldn't get an abortion merely because she doesn't really want a child, then why does it suddenly become okay for literally any other reason? There must have been a reason why it wasn't okay to get an abortion for "no good reason," and the explanation for that is because the unborn child is still a human life. You are conceding that it is not morally acceptable to take a life for simply your own convenience - but this is purely arbitrary. If "not really wanting a child," is not acceptable, why is "(the assumption of) not being able to take care of the child," acceptable? What standard are these points of acceptable/unacceptable based upon?
Nothing. They are arbitrary. If it is not okay to terminate a pregnancy for convenience but okay for other reasons, that view is nothing more than an arbitrary moral standard, created due to personal feelings that have no basis in logical or even moral reality. Killing unborn children is either okay or not okay, all other factors are superfluous.
This means that it is either always okay to terminate your pregnancy or it is never okay. Yes, never. It is either always morally wrong to choose to eliminate an unborn human life or it is always morally acceptable to choose to eliminate an unborn human life. There must be a standard upon which these beliefs are set.
Some people have followed these ideas to their conclusions and found that they believe that it is indeed always morally acceptable to terminate an unborn life. We naturally find discomfort in the beliefs of these people due to their other implications. They are genuinely stating that they find murder of undesirables acceptable.
The problem with this viewpoint is that it can easily leak out into other types of murder. Like with the starting point of abortion, if you draw these ideas to their complete conclusion, you will be unable to reconcile them with other beliefs. Like, why it is not okay to murder anyone else if it is okay to murder the unborn?
Ideas have consequences.
If you can find yourself coming to the conclusion that it is morally acceptable to murder a certain group of people - the unborn - on what moral grounds do you conclude that it's not okay to murder other groups of people? If it's okay to abort unborn children who have been diagnosed with Down's syndrome, why is it not okay to murder born children or adults with Down's syndrome?
It may be that other people are born, you conclude. But you've still failed to draw these ideas to the final conclusions. Why is it okay to murder the unborn simply for not being born yet? What properties do the unborn have that qualify them for murder? Is it that they rely on another person to stay alive? Is it that they are not yet cognitively aware of their own self? Is it because they inhabit another person? What about not being born yet qualifies them for indiscriminate murder?
If it is okay to murder the unborn because they are not aware of their own self, is it okay to murder mentally incapable people who are not aware of the same? If it is okay to murder the unborn because they depend on other people for survival, is it okay to murder people who are disabled and would starve without either government, family, or community assistance? If your mother has complete and absolute dementia, is unable to feed or bathe herself, and is so senile that she does not even recognize that she is alive, is it okay to murder her?
Why is it okay to murder the unborn because they inhabit another person? What about that situation is wrong? Because the other person does not want them there? Is it then okay to murder people because other people don't want them inhabiting the areas they're inhabiting?
We are all aware how a woman becomes pregnant. The argument from "bodily autonomy" attempts to deceive people into somehow believing that a woman was not aware she could become pregnant from having sex. It disassociates the clear and unmistakable reality that we all understand - we all know how people are made. Attempting to disconnect sex from baby making and then take on the belief that it is okay to terminate a pregnancy because you "didn't give it permission to be there," truly makes you out to be a fool. You know how it got there. You were fully and completely aware of how that baby was made and why it's now inside of you - attempting to claim you didn't give the baby permission is simply another form of trying to avoid responsibility for your actions. People want the ability to have sex without consequences - but that is not reality. It never has been and never will. You do not get to arbitrarily decide that pregnancy is no longer possible from sexual activity. Babies are made through sex - we are all aware of this. It is purely an act of volitional ignorance to attempt to disconnect these two things from reality.
The only situation in which you could make the argument that the unborn is inhabiting another person "without their permission," is in the case of rape. But no viewpoint is established with only one leg to stand on - everything else discussed is still part of the debate. If it is not okay to get an abortion for any other reason except for rape, does that invalidate the fact that the unborn life is still a life?
It is still a life. You are still choosing the abortion for the reason that it is not acceptable for you to carry and birth this child for a reason that you chose arbitrarily. The unborn child is still an innocent life - and we seem to forget that the child did not choose to inhabit the woman, either.
Choosing to abort a child because of a rape is still a moral question. If you find yourself able to reconcile that it is okay to murder an unborn life because of the violent act of a third party because you did not choose to become pregnant, you are are ignoring that the child did not choose to be there - and it did not choose to be murdered. An act of violence against another person removes their freedom to choose from the equation - being raped against your will is a horrible act of violence, and being impregnated by that violent act will make it even more traumatizing. But life isn't easy - no one ever said that it would be. If they did, ensure that you tell this person that they are a liar.
Being murdered against your will is also a horrible act of violence that takes away your right to life. This applies equally to the unborn. You cannot reconcile responding to a violent act against an innocent person with another violent act against another innocent person. It is the same - any argument against this can only attempt to be validated with the view that the unborn will not feel it and will not know the pain of having their life taken from them. Is it then okay to murder someone after putting them into a medically induced coma? Is it okay to murder the mentally incapacitated? Is it okay to murder someone in their sleep?
Ideas have consequences.
Once we accept murder for any one reason, it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves unable to argue against murder for other reasons - without changing our ideas.
Proponents of abortion refer to it as "health care," "women's rights," "reproductive rights," etc. They claim that opponents of abortion are infringing on "basic health care rights," "women's right to choose," etc., some going so far as to claim that abortion opponents literally just hate women and/or are "forcing them to have children," etc.
Opponents of abortion refer to abortion as murder and consider their fight to be for the protection of human life. They generally believe that proponents of abortion are not simply "making a choice," but actually taking the fate of innocent human lives into their own hands, deciding who will live and who will die.
What is most peculiar is that both of these sides debate using these types of rhetoric in the same arguments, and it appears like neither of them really understands what the other side actually thinks. An opponent of abortion can make a statement that they are against the murder of unborn lives, and someone will retort that that person is against women's health care. If you actually pay attention to these debates, it seems absolutely ludicrous.
One side uses words and phrases in an attempt to make abortion seem as innocuous and normal as possible, referring to it as a normal health care procedure, while the other focuses on the question of morality and the realities of the human lives being affected.
One side is employing deception, while the other is often accused of emotional manipulation or the like.
Now, proponents of abortion have come up with various arguments to combat the concerns of abortion opponents in various ways, but abortion opponents actually haven't had to change their own arguments. This is because, at the end of the day, abortion is a disagreement on a moral issue, that issue being, essentially, is it morally acceptable for a woman to choose to terminate her pregnancy through medical intervention? Will we, as a society, allow this practice to occur legally?
This is not something "science" can answer. This is not something that can be answered by statistics or mob rule opinion - it is through and through a moral, and to a lesser extent societal, issue.
Abortion supporters attempt to circumvent this reality by bringing science and health care terms into the equation, but it only serves to divert attention from the reality of the question.
The fact of the matter is, no one isn't sure whether or not the "clump of cells" inside of a woman's body will turn into a human being if it is allowed to mature and be born.
The fact of the matter is, no one is unclear about whether or not sexual activity can lead to pregnancy.
The fact of the matter is, no one is unclear about what "pregnancy" actually means.
What has happened is an attempt to divert attention from these obvious realities and "reeducate" people about what's "really" the question at hand.
To a person who views abortion as a moral question and personally finds that their answer to that question is a resounding "no," these rhetoric attempts at redefining "life," "health care," and "rights," is actually completely repugnant. It can be very difficult to genuinely attempt to see eye to eye with someone who, in their minds, is literally advocating the murder of innocent human lives. This is something abortion proponents either don't understand or choose to ignore.
Proponents of abortion typically have been taught that a fetus is not a "life" (or not a life until x amount of time) and therefore it's not wrong to remove it for any reason, or any specific variety of reasons. There are extreme abortion supporters who do actually concede that the life inside of a woman is a human life, but insist that it is actually simply morally okay for a woman to make the choice to take that human life if she desires. It is nearly impossible to make ground with these latter people, but the abortion supporters who simply don't believe that an unborn human is still a life - or they haven't come to the conscious conclusion as to what that fetus being a life actually means - are a bit easier on the stomach.
What has happened is that the abortion proponent rhetoric has caused these people to disassociate the obvious realities of how people are made with what abortion is.
When we find out the answer to our childhood question of "where do babies come from," the natural conclusion that will be made by most people is that the thing inside of a pregnant woman will come out and become a person. This is the point at which people will either carry on with the obvious reality that the pregnant woman has a human life inside of her, or the person will be reeducated and taught that that life is not, in fact, human, until an arbitrary period of time, or just whenever it comes out. Without taking any time to think further into this explanation, a person will generally accept that abortion is therefore okay.
What is important to note here is that the natural reaction of children is that a pregnant woman has another child inside of her, a child like them. They realize that that is how they came into this world, and knowing that they are in fact alive, they attribute those characteristics naturally to the life inside of the pregnant woman. My nephews do not question whether or not their cousin inside of me is a human life, they know that it is their cousin and that they will have to wait a few more months to meet him. They did not ask whether or not their cousin was a human yet, or how long until he's alive - they ask how long until he's born. They know he will be born and come out into this world as a baby human life, but for now he's still developing.
It is from this position that another person will attempt to reeducate this child and inform them that what they believe to be a human life is actually not - either not until x amount of weeks/months, or not until the baby comes out. Any further questioning will usually result in an explanation that the baby isn't a person until it comes out because while inside it's still "a clump of cells," or similar rhetoric.
The problem is, the people campaigning these viewpoints have generally never had a child. There are of course pro-abortion mothers, but it's hard to see how this position could be from anything other than cognitive dissonance.
I was formerly a proponent of abortion due to the deceptive rhetoric of "women's rights," and "it's just a clump of cells." The problem with these explanations are that they either tiptoe around the issue or just flat out tell a lie.
A developing human baby inside of a woman is no more a clump of cells than we all are. What do you actually believe happens inside of a pregnant woman? You don't have to go to a politically motivated website to find the reality of how a child develops. It has never been more clear to me than it became after I've actually been pregnant.
You probably won't feel your baby kick until sometime between 16 and 22 weeks, even though he started moving at 7 or 8 weeks, and you may have already witnessed his acrobatics if you've had an ultrasound.
If something that moves and kicks - as in, with legs - after mere weeks is a "clump of cells," then we all are.
After the deceptive rhetoric melted away and I saw the reality that the developing fetus is in no unclear terms an actual human life, the first feeling was in fact of guilt. A strong feeling of guilt for espousing the belief that it was okay to murder people merely because they were still inside of another person, and a strong feeling of embarrassment. It was embarrassing to realize that I had essentially been tricked - and being tricked makes you feel stupid.
It's hard to get a true believer in abortion, or any issue, to open their eyes for this reason - the human mind knows that it will feel a great deal of embarrassment when it is shown to have held a false belief. We don't enjoy the feeling of realizing we've been wrong, sudden flashbacks to all of the arguments we had, remembering the things that we argued and realizing how misled and wrong they were - and how right those other people had been all along. It's not easy, and many people would instead feel compelled to dig themselves deeper into the rhetoric, swallow more of the lies, and nestle safely in their misguided world views rather than face the reality that they were, bluntly, stupid.
I was very stupid. I cannot feel any more guilty than I feel when my unborn son reacts to light and sound inside of me. I cannot feel any more guilty about how I used to believe that lives like his were disposable for the sake of convenience. I feel disgusted with myself for ever thinking that way.
I remember getting frustrated reading the opinions of people who genuinely believed it was okay to terminate a developing human life merely because you are inconvenienced by it before I was pregnant - and that is not a strawman. There are people who will concede that an unborn baby is a human life - mostly because it is unavoidable reality - but still choose to believe that it is okay to terminate that life. Now that I've come to realize the reality of a fetus' life, I cannot even stand it - the way it makes me feel can't be adequately described. The closest word to the experience would be heartbreaking. A close second is revulsion.
It is heartbreaking to see someone champion so fervently a view that is literally murder - it is literally the view that one life is more valuable than another, so much more valuable that that person should have the moral authority over whether or not that other life can be murdered. These are the same types of views espoused by people who believe in eugenics and ethnic cleansing - that it is okay to eliminate certain lives for our convenience and "benefit."
As long as their cognitive dissonance keeps them from realizing that this view is advocating murder, they will never realize that their world view is causing real harm to human lives. The abortion advocates who don't seem to care if who they kill is alive or not do not lose quite as much as the innocents who were stripped of their personhood and murdered without a voice.
Ideas have consequences - and innocent people are the victims of this world view.
It is less emotionally devastating to read the viewpoints of people who have simply not recognized the realities of what life is. These viewpoints don't thrive on cognitive dissonance so much as a failure to draw ideas to their full conclusions. People who believe it's okay to have an abortion before x amount of weeks or that it's only okay to have an abortion under certain circumstances have yet to fully actualize their views.
Why is it okay to terminate a pregnancy when it is only six weeks along? Why not eight? Is a second trimester abortion okay? What makes a first trimester abortion okay, but not a second trimester abortion?
It is all arbitrary. You cannot choose a magical benchmark point of development. If an abortion is not okay at six weeks, that means that you are conceding that the unborn baby is indeed a life that should not be able to be terminated, and you've merely attached an arbitrary benchmark length of time for when it is or is not a life. If it is a life at six weeks, it's a life at one day - it is impossible to argue otherwise. You must then agree that if the baby was not aborted before six weeks, it would have continued to develop past six weeks - thus magically becoming a life worthy of protecting. If it will "become" a life in six weeks, what was it before then? It was not something different just because it was sooner - it was still a life before six weeks. If it's a life when it comes out, it's a life when it's inside. It could not be otherwise - our basic logical understandings of reality point to this conclusion. If we see an oak tree, we know it was once an acorn. If we see a cooked beefsteak, we know it used to be an uncooked beefsteak - and before then, part of a cow. What else could it possibly have been? This is the law of continuity, and when we remove this obvious reality from human lives, we are betraying logic and reason.
You cannot reconcile the belief that it is okay to terminate a pregnancy only because of specific reasons, not including convenience, with the reasoning as to why it is not okay to terminate a pregnancy merely for convenience. What is truly the difference? If you concede that a woman shouldn't get an abortion merely because she doesn't really want a child, then why does it suddenly become okay for literally any other reason? There must have been a reason why it wasn't okay to get an abortion for "no good reason," and the explanation for that is because the unborn child is still a human life. You are conceding that it is not morally acceptable to take a life for simply your own convenience - but this is purely arbitrary. If "not really wanting a child," is not acceptable, why is "(the assumption of) not being able to take care of the child," acceptable? What standard are these points of acceptable/unacceptable based upon?
Nothing. They are arbitrary. If it is not okay to terminate a pregnancy for convenience but okay for other reasons, that view is nothing more than an arbitrary moral standard, created due to personal feelings that have no basis in logical or even moral reality. Killing unborn children is either okay or not okay, all other factors are superfluous.
This means that it is either always okay to terminate your pregnancy or it is never okay. Yes, never. It is either always morally wrong to choose to eliminate an unborn human life or it is always morally acceptable to choose to eliminate an unborn human life. There must be a standard upon which these beliefs are set.
Some people have followed these ideas to their conclusions and found that they believe that it is indeed always morally acceptable to terminate an unborn life. We naturally find discomfort in the beliefs of these people due to their other implications. They are genuinely stating that they find murder of undesirables acceptable.
The problem with this viewpoint is that it can easily leak out into other types of murder. Like with the starting point of abortion, if you draw these ideas to their complete conclusion, you will be unable to reconcile them with other beliefs. Like, why it is not okay to murder anyone else if it is okay to murder the unborn?
Ideas have consequences.
If you can find yourself coming to the conclusion that it is morally acceptable to murder a certain group of people - the unborn - on what moral grounds do you conclude that it's not okay to murder other groups of people? If it's okay to abort unborn children who have been diagnosed with Down's syndrome, why is it not okay to murder born children or adults with Down's syndrome?
It may be that other people are born, you conclude. But you've still failed to draw these ideas to the final conclusions. Why is it okay to murder the unborn simply for not being born yet? What properties do the unborn have that qualify them for murder? Is it that they rely on another person to stay alive? Is it that they are not yet cognitively aware of their own self? Is it because they inhabit another person? What about not being born yet qualifies them for indiscriminate murder?
If it is okay to murder the unborn because they are not aware of their own self, is it okay to murder mentally incapable people who are not aware of the same? If it is okay to murder the unborn because they depend on other people for survival, is it okay to murder people who are disabled and would starve without either government, family, or community assistance? If your mother has complete and absolute dementia, is unable to feed or bathe herself, and is so senile that she does not even recognize that she is alive, is it okay to murder her?
Why is it okay to murder the unborn because they inhabit another person? What about that situation is wrong? Because the other person does not want them there? Is it then okay to murder people because other people don't want them inhabiting the areas they're inhabiting?
We are all aware how a woman becomes pregnant. The argument from "bodily autonomy" attempts to deceive people into somehow believing that a woman was not aware she could become pregnant from having sex. It disassociates the clear and unmistakable reality that we all understand - we all know how people are made. Attempting to disconnect sex from baby making and then take on the belief that it is okay to terminate a pregnancy because you "didn't give it permission to be there," truly makes you out to be a fool. You know how it got there. You were fully and completely aware of how that baby was made and why it's now inside of you - attempting to claim you didn't give the baby permission is simply another form of trying to avoid responsibility for your actions. People want the ability to have sex without consequences - but that is not reality. It never has been and never will. You do not get to arbitrarily decide that pregnancy is no longer possible from sexual activity. Babies are made through sex - we are all aware of this. It is purely an act of volitional ignorance to attempt to disconnect these two things from reality.
The only situation in which you could make the argument that the unborn is inhabiting another person "without their permission," is in the case of rape. But no viewpoint is established with only one leg to stand on - everything else discussed is still part of the debate. If it is not okay to get an abortion for any other reason except for rape, does that invalidate the fact that the unborn life is still a life?
It is still a life. You are still choosing the abortion for the reason that it is not acceptable for you to carry and birth this child for a reason that you chose arbitrarily. The unborn child is still an innocent life - and we seem to forget that the child did not choose to inhabit the woman, either.
Choosing to abort a child because of a rape is still a moral question. If you find yourself able to reconcile that it is okay to murder an unborn life because of the violent act of a third party because you did not choose to become pregnant, you are are ignoring that the child did not choose to be there - and it did not choose to be murdered. An act of violence against another person removes their freedom to choose from the equation - being raped against your will is a horrible act of violence, and being impregnated by that violent act will make it even more traumatizing. But life isn't easy - no one ever said that it would be. If they did, ensure that you tell this person that they are a liar.
Being murdered against your will is also a horrible act of violence that takes away your right to life. This applies equally to the unborn. You cannot reconcile responding to a violent act against an innocent person with another violent act against another innocent person. It is the same - any argument against this can only attempt to be validated with the view that the unborn will not feel it and will not know the pain of having their life taken from them. Is it then okay to murder someone after putting them into a medically induced coma? Is it okay to murder the mentally incapacitated? Is it okay to murder someone in their sleep?
Ideas have consequences.
Once we accept murder for any one reason, it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves unable to argue against murder for other reasons - without changing our ideas.
Tuesday, June 21, 2016
Bad Arguments From Atheists
As a show of good faith, I'm going to go through a few typical atheist arguments that are fundamentally ineffective and will do nothing but make you seem like an uninformed, unprepared sixteen year old fedora wearing pseudo-intellectual. Hearing these arguments as a theist are essentially like hearing "if we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" as an atheist - painfully misled arguments that we are absolutely sick of having to explain to every single atheist who so much as walks by.
This will not include arguments that are actually good questions. Many arguments atheists make can be considered good arguments as they tend to reflect thoughtful and important questions that theologians have actually been talking about centuries. However, this has no bearing on whether or not you act like you're literally the first person to ever think about that question. Please also don't do that, no matter how legitimate the question you have about faith really is. Basically everything has been brought up before, you aren't throwing anyone a curve ball.
These will include arguments against God as a concept, religion as a concept, and some individual religious claims. While of course arguments against individual religious claims can be made by proponents of other religions and not exclusively by atheists, I'm not making an entirely separate post for those claims so I'm lumping them in here.
These are in no particular order (at this time).
Which "god" are you talking about?
What atheists using this argument mean to imply is that theists arguing for the existence of God are arguing for the existence of a particular "god", even going so far as to include the many perceived deities of pantheistic religions. The atheist is attempting to argue that this God is arbitrary because it is being defined by a particular religious doctrine which has yet to be proven true. Additionally, this argument has the perceived benefit of requiring that the theist must prove their religion is the one true religion before they can prove that "their God" exists. At the end of the day, this argument only works against theists who also don't understand why this argument is faulty.
The Answer:
Any theist worth their salt is talking about The Unmoved Mover, The Uncaused First Cause, the one, the only, concept understood to be God. While someone may be a Christian or of x y z faith, the concept understood to be God is not bound to a religious doctrine - the Unmoved Mover was not even lost on the pantheistic Greek and Roman religions of their time - they did not believe Zeus to be the Unmoved Mover. They didn't think any one of their particular gods created the universe, life, and all existence. There were their gods, and then there was whatever caused existence to exist. The concept of what caused existence to exist is known as God.
The concept understood to be God is the reason why anything exists at all. The concept understood to be God is the literal cause of existence - the timeless, spaceless, and immaterial maximally great being who willed this plane of existence into being. Whether that God is best described by any particular religious doctrine is a completely different concept and argument. No religion is arguing for a different Unmoved Mover - they all agree this Creator exists, they are simply debating upon the qualities of that being. There are no different "Gods," there is one God, one Uncaused First Cause, and each religion has disagreements as to how to best describe that being.
Indeed, there cannot be any different "God." For there to be two separate beings, there must be something unique about them to distinguish them from one another. If the concept understood to be God is a timeless, spaceless, immaterial, all powerful, all knowledgeable personal Creator, what possible attributes could separate this particular concept from another concept? The only way to do so would be to have one of those others "gods" be lesser than this maximally great being, thereby making that being not God by definition in the first place.
The argument "Which "god" are you talking about," demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophical concept of God.
Similar arguments:
Any attempt at boiling God down to "an imaginary friend," "a sky fairy," or "old man in the sky," also miss this same philosophical point. The theist's argument is that there is a cause to existence and that cause is the concept understood to be God. Attempting to deny that there is a reason why anything exists at all is not simply a philosophical misunderstanding, it's intellectually insincere - clearly we exist, so there must be a reason for that. In order to argue against the existence of God, you must replace Him with something else - you can't simply explain Him away, as you are still left to explain why anything exists at all without Him.
There is no evidence for God, therefore he doesn't exist.
A specific argument is being made here. It is different from, "I don't believe in God because I don't believe there is evidence that He exists," (this is an understandable stance) it is "because there is no evidence that God exists, it means that he does not." It is an absolute argument. The claim is that a lack of evidence proves an absence of evidence due to the nonexistence of the concept. This argument demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of logic itself and is actually incredibly harmful to the atheist making the argument - any alert person can make the atheist using this argument look like a complete fool.
The Answer:
Simply: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Things do not not exist until evidence is found for them. This would imply that anything undiscovered does not exist. It would imply that we have discovered everything that there is to discover, as there could not possibly be anything outside of the evidence which we have already uncovered for the existence of things we know to exist. It strictly misses very obvious realities that are demonstrable and evident throughout our entire lives.
Even if it were true that "there is no evidence for God," it would not prove that He doesn't exist. That is not how things work. The only thing that a lack of evidence does is make it unlikely that something exists. If there is a lack of evidence for something, it is not the same as having evidence that shows explicitly that something is not true. If I claim I was punched in the face by a masked assailant at an event, but there was a lack of evidence of this occurrence - no bruises, no lingering pain, no traces of a perpetrator, no eyewitnesses, no footprints, fingerprints, DNA, photo or video evidence or otherwise - it does not mean that it has been proven that I have actually not been punched in the face. It simply makes my claim unlikely - possibly highly unlikely, but not definitively false. If I claim I was punched in the face, but there is evidence showing that I was actually not - a full length video recording of the event at which I claimed to be punched in which I am not punched, for example - that would prove that I was not punched in the face.
If you aim to disprove God, you'd need evidence proving that He does not exist. You cannot simply cite a lack of evidence as proof that He doesn't exist - you can't do that for anything. That has never been, never is, and never will be an acceptable method of proving something - anything, not even just God. You can't cite a lack of evidence as proof that I don't own a cat - maybe I'm just super good at hiding it.
All religions are essentially the same.
This argument attempts to equate all religion doctrine as "being essentially the same," thereby enabling the atheist to dismiss all of it with one fell swoop - basically using just one religion to disprove another, or all of them. This is a fallacy of composition - it assumes that because some parts of all religions are similar, that all religions are therefore the same. It misunderstands the concept of religion and of various religions as a whole.
The Answer:
Different religions make vastly different claims. Each religion has some sort of description of the concept understood to be God and answers the four fundamental questions: How did we get here, why are we here, what are we here for, and where are we going. There are also non-religious answers to these questions. Attempting to equate different religious doctrines for these similarities is absurd, especially considering that the similarities literally stop there - and even though the answers to the questions are all present, all of those answers are different.
Attempting to equate the claims of various religions ignores that many of them are contradictory - they cannot both be correct at the same time. Christianity claims that faith in Jesus is the only way to Heaven. Islam claims that faith in Jesus is a "Go directly to jail," card. These claims are in absolute and exact opposition with one another. Many Eastern religions claim that God is one or all, while Christianity claims God is a trinity. You aren't just comparing oranges and apples, you're trying to say oranges are essentially rabbits.
This claim ignores all of the vast and contradictory claims of religions and attempts to classify them as all being the same by the absolute most vague similarities - it ignores that Judaism believes a savior has yet to come and Christianity believes the savior has come as Jesus by just lumping having beliefs about stuff into the same category.
Clumping religions together as one lets the atheist escape having to disprove each religion one by one based on their own individual claims. Just like scientific theories, religious truth claims must all be tested on their own merits. The atheist wishes to brush this one under the rug and ignore the stark reality that disproving one religion does not disprove them all by attempting to claim that they are all actually the same thing.
The smartest people are all atheists.
This is an appeal to authority and is a failure for a claim from its very basic form. What the atheist attempts to do is cite "smart people" as an authority for what is or is not true. The atheist makes this claim to attempt to disarm the theist, essentially calling him "not smart," by induction, as well as dismissing theism as a "not smart" thing to believe. He also does himself the honor of classifying himself as a "smart person," for being an atheist. This claim is not only logically fallacious, but it is ego stroking at its finest. The atheist says that he is most certainly a smart person for being an atheist, while the theist is absolutely a not smart person for not being an atheist.
The Answer:
The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy for a reason. It is 100% irrelevant what any particular group of people thinks if they are wrong. In other words, if all of the smartest people believed that puppies could fly, they would still be wrong. If everyone in the entire world believed God was not real, it would not affect whether or not God was real. How smart someone is does not affect how correct they are - it can lead to the reasonable belief that they could be right, if, for example, they proved themselves to be an expert on the matter or otherwise very reliable, but smart people have been wrong about stuff and will continue to be wrong about stuff forever. In fact, if they are unable to understand when and how they are wrong, they may actually not be very smart.
This fallacious argumentation occurs because of similar fallacies of composition. People do this all the time with "scientists": anything a scientists says is probably correct. After all, it's a scientist. They're smart people!
I'll show why this is silly with an example. When I was a child, I didn't understand why I had to go to different doctors for things. I also didn't understand why I had to go to a different building to have my braces worked on than I had to go to for regular dentist check ups. I didn't know why my mother had to go to a different doctor than I did, and I didn't understand why, when I was diagnosed as possibly anemic, I had to go to a different doctor than the one who said that. Why weren't all these doctors and dentists all able to do everything? And why wasn't my guidance counselor, Dr. Rudolf, a "real" doctor?
As a child, I didn't understand the concept of a specialist - I didn't understand that not all doctors were all trained to all be able to do everything and I didn't understand that a "doctorate" does not make someone a doctor of medicine. Atheists tend to not understand that not all scientists are all trained to be able to understand and explain everything. "Science" is such a broad category of things, it would be quite the accomplishment for someone to be an expert in every single field of science. Atheists think even engineers are experts on science - they aren't even scientists! I mean, atheists even think they themselves are reliable scientific experts. The irony is scientists are usually specifically not even trained in theology. They are not only not experts on the subject, they tend to be dramatically more misinformed about theism than your everyday person is about science.
Similar arguments:
Appeal to popularity arguments that run along the lines of, "more people are becoming atheists," or "more people are atheists," fail for the same reasons. It is irrelevant how many people are atheists, they could all be wrong. Considering that atheists believe theists were wrong even when they were the majority, it is strange how they manage to make this fallacious argument with a straight face.
You're only x religion because of where you were born. If you were born in y, you'd be z religion.
The atheist's argument here is that you didn't pick your religion, you just wound up in it due to circumstance and your belief in it, therefore, is unfounded and without true reasoning or understanding. If you, specifically you, happened to be born in a Hindu or Muslim home, you'd be one of those religions. But, you were born in a Christian household, so you're a Christian, and it has nothing to do with your personal responsibility for your beliefs or critical thinking skills - you're just a victim of circumstance.
The Answer:
This argument is so popular and pervasive that even Richard Dawkins uses it. Surely it can't be that obviously fallacious if Richard Dawkins uses it, after all, he's a "smart person."
This argument oddly ignores where the atheist gets his belief from - if an atheist was raised in an atheist household and remains an atheist, doesn't he fall victim to the same argument?
Another strange thing this argument does is ignore the vast numbers of people who have swapped from one religion to another - including people who have gone from theism to atheism and vice versa, yes, people who were raised atheist and became religious.
It also ignores a crucially important point - you aren't simply religious because your parents were. You have to make a conscious and purposeful decision to become a [religious adjective here]. In order to be a/an anything, you have to make the purposeful decision to be that thing. A person who believes in x because their parents did, and for no other reason, is not in the same weight class as a person who actively made a conscious choice to believe in that thing.
On the flip side, some people's "religious upbringings" were very lackadaisical. Being "raised Christian" is meaningless if, the very first time that you considered the realities of religion, you rejected it. This is what I did - my first conscious decision of faith was to become an atheist. I was not actually a Christian before that - I did not make a conscious decision to follow Jesus, I did not commit my life to Him - I did not purposefully and willingly make a genuine decision out of my belief and convictions to be a Christian. That wasn't until later, after a more in-depth analysis of the situation. Simply put, I specifically am not a Christian "simply because I was brought up in a Christian household." That erases the reality of my lived experiences - the many years I lived as an atheist after becoming self-aware enough to even question what religion was in the first place.
The important point here is that this argument ignores the obvious and demonstrable reality that many many people are in fact not the religion of their upbringing. If this were the case, why are there Middle Eastern Christians being set on fire inside of cages for being apostates? Why are there Chinese Christians worshiping in secret underground churches to avoid no-due-process execution if their government finds them? Why are some of the most insightful and fascinating Christian apologists former Hindus, Muslims, and atheists? Bottom line is that this argument ignores provable reality.
I don't have to research theology because I know it's wrong.
This argument attempts to dismiss theology, God, religion, and all related subjects as entirely worthless. The idea behind this argument is that those subjects are so wholly false that someone doesn't even need to know about them in order to dismiss them. This argument runs off the assumption that theology can be dismissed without further questions - it is the action of presupposing that God does not exist put into words. An argument like this also tends to do the atheist the favor of putting himself on higher intellectual grounds - the atheist is so smart, that he knows theism is false without even knowing what it is!
The Answer:
You are making the statement that you literally do not need to have a fundamental understanding of that which you are arguing against. You are furthermore insisting that you have the power of divination, allowing you to know whether or not something is wrong without even knowing what it is.
If I were to say that I don't need to study evolution because I know it's wrong, what would the response likely be? (side note: I have thoroughly researched evolution.) Now, I can say I don't need to study evolution because I don't actually care or I am not interested, but this is merely being willfully ignorant. The statement that I do not have to because I know it's wrong is a different statement - it's a positive claim, an argument for an absolute. I would not be caught dead arguing against something of which I have no knowledge - that the atheist would do this while simultaneously proclaiming his intellectual superiority is astounding.
This is an odd case of special pleading - it's like reverse special pleading. You are insisting that the area of study of theology is unique from any other in that it can be dismissed outright for no real reason. You are presupposing that it is wrong, making a claim without any evidence that it is in fact simply ignorable - for no reason other than "because." Nothing else works this way. There is no area of study or concept where you could claim it to be irrelevant specifically without knowing anything about it. This would get you laughed out of the room for any other idea, so how is it somehow acceptable here?
Most importantly, this statement is an admission of a losing position. You are admitting you lack any understanding of the subject and are therefore not a trustworthy person for any information relating to it. If you make this claim, you are essentially saying, "anything I say about theism, God, and religion is entirely dismissable due to my fundamental lack of understanding surrounding those subjects." Don't be surprised if theists respond to your attempts at using this argument with "K, bye!"
I guess you don't eat shellfish/I guess you stone adulterers/I guess you consider a menstruating woman to be unclean (any citation of an old Mosaic law).
The argument made here is specifically against the religious doctrine of Christianity. This argument is an attempted "gotcha!" by the atheist (or person affiliated with another religion). This argument can be made with any old Mosaic law - those found around Deuteronomy, Leviticus, etc. The idea here is not that the atheist does actually think the Christian does these things, but that the atheist is assuming they do not and that they are, therefore, a bad Christian and/or going to hell etc.
The Answer:
This line of argumentation ignores that the Old Testament and the New Testament are different covenants. The OT was the covenant before Jesus and the NT is the covenant formed by Jesus. The old laws existed so that those who believed in the promises of God could demonstrate their devotion to Him and trust in His promise through physical rituals.
Once Jesus came, the new covenant was created, replacing the old one - as in, it doesn't apply anymore. Jesus changed the rules dramatically - some notable changes were allowing anyone to enter the kingdom of Heaven through faith in Jesus (before it was just the chosen people, the Jews), establishing the law as a matter of the heart rather than just physical law (it's not enough to just not physically sin, it becomes a matter of intention) and the "new" commandment (love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself).
The misunderstanding that the OT and NT are different covenants leads to many other kinds of misunderstandings about the contents of the bible. For example, the physical law to stone adulterers is not contradicted by Jesus not stoning the adulterer who was brought before Him - He was establishing a new covenant, a new law, therefore the old is overwritten by the new - there is no contradiction as no one is attempting to say that they are both true at the same time.
Jesus didn't come to abolish the old law, it says so right in the bible!
The atheist (or person of other religion) attempts to use this argument as proof that the Old Testament, and therefore its old Mosaic laws, are in fact still applicable to Christians today - thus, we can't eat shellfish or wear clothing of mixed fabrics and should stone adulterers. The argument comes with the quotation of Matthew 5:17, though usually not the entire verse. It is not uncommon to see the quotation...
This is an interesting case of taking a bible verse out of context, as it's not even the end of the sentence.
Even when admitting the full verse, atheists will still attempt to argue that this verse is actually proving that the old laws of the Old Testament are still active today.
The Answer:
This argument ironically takes the very passage that establishes that the old law is no longer applicable and attempts to proclaim that it says the opposite.
This argument, as mentioned, attempts to take this verse out of context and willfully distorts the meanings of the words used. What is in fact being said here is that, yes, Jesus did not come to abolish the old law - the old law cannot be abolished, if it were, it would have been arbitrary and therefore meaningless. He came to fulfill it. This misunderstanding is somewhat understandable because this is not the terminology we would use today to explain the concept that is being described here. What Jesus is saying is that the requirements of the old law are being fulfilled by Him - as in, the reason they were necessary is being filled in with Jesus. We no longer need to live by the old law, the old law being the way in which we demonstrated our faith in God's promise, because God's promise is here in Jesus. Now that God's promise, Jesus, has come, the old law's purpose has been fulfilled.
Another wording of this explanation, the reason we were commanded not to eat shellfish and wear mixed fibers etc. was an attempt at being clean of sin - they were the laws by which we could attain salvation (through demonstrating our trust in God's promise). But now, Jesus is our salvation - He has cleaned us of sin. He fulfilled the purposes of the old laws - they are no longer necessary.
Furthering that, there are more instances than just this one passage of the usage of having the law being fulfilled through Jesus in the bible, and none proclaiming the opposite. For instance, Romans 8:3-4:
The law was unable to cleanse us because we, as a broken people, are sinful. We couldn't possibly fulfill the law on our own, so God sent Jesus, who lived a sinless and perfect life, to fulfill that law for us as we could not do it on our own. If we accept God's free gift, and walk in the spirit with Him, we will be saved through Jesus' sacrifice. I.e., basically the entire base message of Christianity. It's hard to imagine that a lone atheist on the internet managed to dismantle the core concept of Christianity with one half of a bible verse. To make that a little more clear: if the old laws were indeed not fulfilled, that would nullify the entire reason behind Jesus having come in the first place. Since it's made very clear many, many times why Jesus came and what His sacrifice did for us, then it's safe to say that the old law has indeed been fulfilled through Him. That was literally the point of Jesus.
General concepts of argumentation:
Dismissing evidence for God without explanation.
This position stems from the atheist's belief that his stance is a negative claim that does not need to be proven and it's the theist's job to provide evidence for God, which the atheist presupposes will not happen and therefore denies anything presented as evidence. This practice flies in the face of how earnest debate is meant to occur. If you use this chain of thought, you are not winning the argument. You are willfully and volitionally taking on a position of ignorance and insincerity.
The Answer:
You do not prove you're correct by telling someone else "you are wrong." If you wish to engage in any sincere form of debate, you must refute claims that you don't believe to be true. For example, in responding to a theist's logical argument for the existence of God (the cosmological, for example) a response like, "That's ridiculous," has done effectively nothing. If you wish to take on a negative position at first, go ahead. But as soon as someone makes a positive claim, you cannot refute that claim by simply saying it is not a claim. The claim must be refuted or you are not debating - you are just being bullheaded. Saying "that's not convincing," "that's not evidence," "that's illogical/irrational," "that's/you're stupid," are not arguments. You have proven nothing - you are committing the same error you are accusing the theist of committing, that is, making claims without evidence.
By engaging in behavior this way, you are ignoring the realities of logic and debate. A logical argument must be proven to be sound or unsound, the premises must be true or untrue. You don't prove that they are untrue by saying, "that isn't true." You have to provide some sort of refutation to the claim in order to have any validity. Failure to refute a claim means that it has been unchallenged. An unchallenged claim, in an actual debate, is typically a "win" for the person making the claim.
This applies to everything. If I claim the earth is flat (I do not believe this, just to get that out of the way), you don't prove that I'm wrong by calling me a crazy idiot. If a crazy idiot said the earth was round, would he be wrong? You must provide refutations to the claims for evidence that the earth is flat or you must provide evidence that the earth is not flat, or else the claims that the earth is flat have been unchallenged. To explain further here, you do not have to engage the arguments being made, but if you desire to debate and make reasonable arguments for your position, you do not so so by simply dismissing the argument. What I am explaining here is a fundamental aspect of debate in the first place. If you wish to simply call a theist stupid and not engage their arguments, you have the right to do that, but please be aware you are not "winning" the debate when you do so.
Clarifications:
This, of course, doesn't apply if someone simply states a stance without evidence. If someone just says, "The earth is flat," that isn't an argument, it's a statement. However, don't be fooled - an argument like "God is real because the bible is true," is an argument (though an admittedly bad one to start out the gate with).
The claim of evidence is "the bible is true." This is not the statement for which they are arguing, their argument is that "God is real," and their evidence is "the bible is true." If you dismiss this claim, ignore it, call them stupid, or say that it's not evidence, you aren't doing yourself any favors. This argument is entirely sound - if the bible is true, then God most certainly is real due to the claims within the bible! This logic is sound. In order to refute this argument, you must provide evidence or reasoning for their claim, "the bible is true," to be wrong (or, possibly, that the bible doesn't prove God is real even if it is true if you want to go that route). The debate, in this case, on whether or not God is real would focus on the validity of the bible. And, no, the "burden of proof" is not on them to prove the bible is true because that's not their argument, it's their evidence.
That brings up another one...
Anything regarding the "Burden of Proof"
Atheists love to shift the burden of proof as often as possible, and they do so successfully to the unprepared theist. This concept of argumentation generally rests on the atheist's belief that "atheism is the default position" and therefore any claims of anything outside of atheism are claims that are "guilty until proven innocent." The reason why atheism is not a default claim is a somewhat separate debate to have. The focus here is the typical atheist's misunderstanding of what even is the burden of proof.
The Answer:
A legal definition of the burden of proof:
What we can gather from this is that the prosecutor has the burden of proof. Basically, if you started the argument, you automatically have the burden of proof, regardless of whether you believe your stance is "default" or not. You don't get to start an argument by demanding the theist prove God exists - you don't start an argument by demanding someone else, someone who was not arguing with you until you sparked it, defend themselves. Defend themselves against what? - they haven't said anything. If you wish to sincerely engage with them and question why they believe in God, that's different, but to air drop into a conversation you were not a part of and demand evidence of claims is not how an argument works.
From there, whoever last made a claim with evidence cannot have the burden of proof. You don't get to respond to someone's evidence by telling them that they have to provide further evidence. If you believe their evidence is unsatisfactory, it's now your burden to explain why you feel that way.
This concept of argumentation fails to understand the very basics of debate. Attempting to proclaim that atheism is the default position is special pleading - it is a line of thinking that goes against the very nature of logical discourse. Nowhere else can you inject yourself into a conversation as the instigator, or prosecutor, and demand someone else prove their position - why should atheists be allowed to do this? If you heard someone walking down the street say, "Joe is a total jerk," you can't approach that person and demand they substantiate their claims that Joe is a total jerk. It wasn't even an argument until you started it. The "rules" of argument cannot apply until it becomes an argument.
Getting Philosophical:
To actively make a claim that the burden of proof lies with someone else is, in itself, a positive proof claim that must be backed by evidence. Anyone can turn the tables right around here - whether you're arguing theology or bumper stickers, though it is admittedly quite a tangent. The very nature of making a claim requires evidence - even if your claim is "you have to provide evidence!" You must explain why that person must provide evidence or else your claim is unsubstantiated!
Arguments based off of the concept of science
These arguments revolve around the idea that "science explains everything," "we can only know things through science," "science has made God unnecessary," etc. The atheist is arguing that religion was a placeholder for knowledge - and now that we know how things actually happen, we don't need "God" to explain this. This usually runs off of the idea that ancient people used to blame rain, drought, tornadoes, too much sun, and bad hair days on the wills of God or gods.
The Answer:
Science and religion are not at odds. The belief that there is a war between religion and science, or God and science, is not accurate. Indeed, if God is real, then He created the laws by which our world operates - all the scientific discoveries are just us finally coming to understand the complex ways in which God constructed the world.
What's more interesting is that the one thing science still cannot explain is why anything exists at all without God. All of the scientific information we have about the origins of the universe and how it was created are analogous with a Creator - it all points to an Uncaused First Cause outside of time, space, and matter willing existence into being through a personal action.
Furthermore, science is not the only method through which we can understand the world around us. In fact, there are a great many things that science cannot prove, but we know exist. Science cannot even prove itself - there is no way to test whether or not science exists, or can be trusted, that involve the scientific method.
We can also know things through logic and philosophy. Some things are also self-evident and don't need to be proven through science. Don't get confused, saying something is self-evident does not make it self-evident. A self-evident statement would be along the lines of "I think, therefore I am." Whether or not minds exist cannot be tested scientifically, but they clearly exist - if they did not, we would not be able to think about whether or not they do. This is self-evident.
Indeed, science and God are good friends. The establishment of early science was because of the early Church. The religious should not be afraid of science and the scientific should not be so quick to assume that God did not put into the place the systems we explore through science today.
Fin~
This will not include arguments that are actually good questions. Many arguments atheists make can be considered good arguments as they tend to reflect thoughtful and important questions that theologians have actually been talking about centuries. However, this has no bearing on whether or not you act like you're literally the first person to ever think about that question. Please also don't do that, no matter how legitimate the question you have about faith really is. Basically everything has been brought up before, you aren't throwing anyone a curve ball.
These will include arguments against God as a concept, religion as a concept, and some individual religious claims. While of course arguments against individual religious claims can be made by proponents of other religions and not exclusively by atheists, I'm not making an entirely separate post for those claims so I'm lumping them in here.
These are in no particular order (at this time).
Which "god" are you talking about?
What atheists using this argument mean to imply is that theists arguing for the existence of God are arguing for the existence of a particular "god", even going so far as to include the many perceived deities of pantheistic religions. The atheist is attempting to argue that this God is arbitrary because it is being defined by a particular religious doctrine which has yet to be proven true. Additionally, this argument has the perceived benefit of requiring that the theist must prove their religion is the one true religion before they can prove that "their God" exists. At the end of the day, this argument only works against theists who also don't understand why this argument is faulty.
The Answer:
Any theist worth their salt is talking about The Unmoved Mover, The Uncaused First Cause, the one, the only, concept understood to be God. While someone may be a Christian or of x y z faith, the concept understood to be God is not bound to a religious doctrine - the Unmoved Mover was not even lost on the pantheistic Greek and Roman religions of their time - they did not believe Zeus to be the Unmoved Mover. They didn't think any one of their particular gods created the universe, life, and all existence. There were their gods, and then there was whatever caused existence to exist. The concept of what caused existence to exist is known as God.
The concept understood to be God is the reason why anything exists at all. The concept understood to be God is the literal cause of existence - the timeless, spaceless, and immaterial maximally great being who willed this plane of existence into being. Whether that God is best described by any particular religious doctrine is a completely different concept and argument. No religion is arguing for a different Unmoved Mover - they all agree this Creator exists, they are simply debating upon the qualities of that being. There are no different "Gods," there is one God, one Uncaused First Cause, and each religion has disagreements as to how to best describe that being.
Indeed, there cannot be any different "God." For there to be two separate beings, there must be something unique about them to distinguish them from one another. If the concept understood to be God is a timeless, spaceless, immaterial, all powerful, all knowledgeable personal Creator, what possible attributes could separate this particular concept from another concept? The only way to do so would be to have one of those others "gods" be lesser than this maximally great being, thereby making that being not God by definition in the first place.
The argument "Which "god" are you talking about," demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the philosophical concept of God.
Similar arguments:
Any attempt at boiling God down to "an imaginary friend," "a sky fairy," or "old man in the sky," also miss this same philosophical point. The theist's argument is that there is a cause to existence and that cause is the concept understood to be God. Attempting to deny that there is a reason why anything exists at all is not simply a philosophical misunderstanding, it's intellectually insincere - clearly we exist, so there must be a reason for that. In order to argue against the existence of God, you must replace Him with something else - you can't simply explain Him away, as you are still left to explain why anything exists at all without Him.
There is no evidence for God, therefore he doesn't exist.
A specific argument is being made here. It is different from, "I don't believe in God because I don't believe there is evidence that He exists," (this is an understandable stance) it is "because there is no evidence that God exists, it means that he does not." It is an absolute argument. The claim is that a lack of evidence proves an absence of evidence due to the nonexistence of the concept. This argument demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of logic itself and is actually incredibly harmful to the atheist making the argument - any alert person can make the atheist using this argument look like a complete fool.
The Answer:
Simply: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Things do not not exist until evidence is found for them. This would imply that anything undiscovered does not exist. It would imply that we have discovered everything that there is to discover, as there could not possibly be anything outside of the evidence which we have already uncovered for the existence of things we know to exist. It strictly misses very obvious realities that are demonstrable and evident throughout our entire lives.
Even if it were true that "there is no evidence for God," it would not prove that He doesn't exist. That is not how things work. The only thing that a lack of evidence does is make it unlikely that something exists. If there is a lack of evidence for something, it is not the same as having evidence that shows explicitly that something is not true. If I claim I was punched in the face by a masked assailant at an event, but there was a lack of evidence of this occurrence - no bruises, no lingering pain, no traces of a perpetrator, no eyewitnesses, no footprints, fingerprints, DNA, photo or video evidence or otherwise - it does not mean that it has been proven that I have actually not been punched in the face. It simply makes my claim unlikely - possibly highly unlikely, but not definitively false. If I claim I was punched in the face, but there is evidence showing that I was actually not - a full length video recording of the event at which I claimed to be punched in which I am not punched, for example - that would prove that I was not punched in the face.
If you aim to disprove God, you'd need evidence proving that He does not exist. You cannot simply cite a lack of evidence as proof that He doesn't exist - you can't do that for anything. That has never been, never is, and never will be an acceptable method of proving something - anything, not even just God. You can't cite a lack of evidence as proof that I don't own a cat - maybe I'm just super good at hiding it.
All religions are essentially the same.
This argument attempts to equate all religion doctrine as "being essentially the same," thereby enabling the atheist to dismiss all of it with one fell swoop - basically using just one religion to disprove another, or all of them. This is a fallacy of composition - it assumes that because some parts of all religions are similar, that all religions are therefore the same. It misunderstands the concept of religion and of various religions as a whole.
The Answer:
Different religions make vastly different claims. Each religion has some sort of description of the concept understood to be God and answers the four fundamental questions: How did we get here, why are we here, what are we here for, and where are we going. There are also non-religious answers to these questions. Attempting to equate different religious doctrines for these similarities is absurd, especially considering that the similarities literally stop there - and even though the answers to the questions are all present, all of those answers are different.
Attempting to equate the claims of various religions ignores that many of them are contradictory - they cannot both be correct at the same time. Christianity claims that faith in Jesus is the only way to Heaven. Islam claims that faith in Jesus is a "Go directly to jail," card. These claims are in absolute and exact opposition with one another. Many Eastern religions claim that God is one or all, while Christianity claims God is a trinity. You aren't just comparing oranges and apples, you're trying to say oranges are essentially rabbits.
This claim ignores all of the vast and contradictory claims of religions and attempts to classify them as all being the same by the absolute most vague similarities - it ignores that Judaism believes a savior has yet to come and Christianity believes the savior has come as Jesus by just lumping having beliefs about stuff into the same category.
Clumping religions together as one lets the atheist escape having to disprove each religion one by one based on their own individual claims. Just like scientific theories, religious truth claims must all be tested on their own merits. The atheist wishes to brush this one under the rug and ignore the stark reality that disproving one religion does not disprove them all by attempting to claim that they are all actually the same thing.
The smartest people are all atheists.
This is an appeal to authority and is a failure for a claim from its very basic form. What the atheist attempts to do is cite "smart people" as an authority for what is or is not true. The atheist makes this claim to attempt to disarm the theist, essentially calling him "not smart," by induction, as well as dismissing theism as a "not smart" thing to believe. He also does himself the honor of classifying himself as a "smart person," for being an atheist. This claim is not only logically fallacious, but it is ego stroking at its finest. The atheist says that he is most certainly a smart person for being an atheist, while the theist is absolutely a not smart person for not being an atheist.
The Answer:
The appeal to authority is a logical fallacy for a reason. It is 100% irrelevant what any particular group of people thinks if they are wrong. In other words, if all of the smartest people believed that puppies could fly, they would still be wrong. If everyone in the entire world believed God was not real, it would not affect whether or not God was real. How smart someone is does not affect how correct they are - it can lead to the reasonable belief that they could be right, if, for example, they proved themselves to be an expert on the matter or otherwise very reliable, but smart people have been wrong about stuff and will continue to be wrong about stuff forever. In fact, if they are unable to understand when and how they are wrong, they may actually not be very smart.
This fallacious argumentation occurs because of similar fallacies of composition. People do this all the time with "scientists": anything a scientists says is probably correct. After all, it's a scientist. They're smart people!
I'll show why this is silly with an example. When I was a child, I didn't understand why I had to go to different doctors for things. I also didn't understand why I had to go to a different building to have my braces worked on than I had to go to for regular dentist check ups. I didn't know why my mother had to go to a different doctor than I did, and I didn't understand why, when I was diagnosed as possibly anemic, I had to go to a different doctor than the one who said that. Why weren't all these doctors and dentists all able to do everything? And why wasn't my guidance counselor, Dr. Rudolf, a "real" doctor?
As a child, I didn't understand the concept of a specialist - I didn't understand that not all doctors were all trained to all be able to do everything and I didn't understand that a "doctorate" does not make someone a doctor of medicine. Atheists tend to not understand that not all scientists are all trained to be able to understand and explain everything. "Science" is such a broad category of things, it would be quite the accomplishment for someone to be an expert in every single field of science. Atheists think even engineers are experts on science - they aren't even scientists! I mean, atheists even think they themselves are reliable scientific experts. The irony is scientists are usually specifically not even trained in theology. They are not only not experts on the subject, they tend to be dramatically more misinformed about theism than your everyday person is about science.
Similar arguments:
Appeal to popularity arguments that run along the lines of, "more people are becoming atheists," or "more people are atheists," fail for the same reasons. It is irrelevant how many people are atheists, they could all be wrong. Considering that atheists believe theists were wrong even when they were the majority, it is strange how they manage to make this fallacious argument with a straight face.
You're only x religion because of where you were born. If you were born in y, you'd be z religion.
The atheist's argument here is that you didn't pick your religion, you just wound up in it due to circumstance and your belief in it, therefore, is unfounded and without true reasoning or understanding. If you, specifically you, happened to be born in a Hindu or Muslim home, you'd be one of those religions. But, you were born in a Christian household, so you're a Christian, and it has nothing to do with your personal responsibility for your beliefs or critical thinking skills - you're just a victim of circumstance.
The Answer:
This argument is so popular and pervasive that even Richard Dawkins uses it. Surely it can't be that obviously fallacious if Richard Dawkins uses it, after all, he's a "smart person."
This argument oddly ignores where the atheist gets his belief from - if an atheist was raised in an atheist household and remains an atheist, doesn't he fall victim to the same argument?
Another strange thing this argument does is ignore the vast numbers of people who have swapped from one religion to another - including people who have gone from theism to atheism and vice versa, yes, people who were raised atheist and became religious.
It also ignores a crucially important point - you aren't simply religious because your parents were. You have to make a conscious and purposeful decision to become a [religious adjective here]. In order to be a/an anything, you have to make the purposeful decision to be that thing. A person who believes in x because their parents did, and for no other reason, is not in the same weight class as a person who actively made a conscious choice to believe in that thing.
On the flip side, some people's "religious upbringings" were very lackadaisical. Being "raised Christian" is meaningless if, the very first time that you considered the realities of religion, you rejected it. This is what I did - my first conscious decision of faith was to become an atheist. I was not actually a Christian before that - I did not make a conscious decision to follow Jesus, I did not commit my life to Him - I did not purposefully and willingly make a genuine decision out of my belief and convictions to be a Christian. That wasn't until later, after a more in-depth analysis of the situation. Simply put, I specifically am not a Christian "simply because I was brought up in a Christian household." That erases the reality of my lived experiences - the many years I lived as an atheist after becoming self-aware enough to even question what religion was in the first place.
The important point here is that this argument ignores the obvious and demonstrable reality that many many people are in fact not the religion of their upbringing. If this were the case, why are there Middle Eastern Christians being set on fire inside of cages for being apostates? Why are there Chinese Christians worshiping in secret underground churches to avoid no-due-process execution if their government finds them? Why are some of the most insightful and fascinating Christian apologists former Hindus, Muslims, and atheists? Bottom line is that this argument ignores provable reality.
I don't have to research theology because I know it's wrong.
This argument attempts to dismiss theology, God, religion, and all related subjects as entirely worthless. The idea behind this argument is that those subjects are so wholly false that someone doesn't even need to know about them in order to dismiss them. This argument runs off the assumption that theology can be dismissed without further questions - it is the action of presupposing that God does not exist put into words. An argument like this also tends to do the atheist the favor of putting himself on higher intellectual grounds - the atheist is so smart, that he knows theism is false without even knowing what it is!
The Answer:
You are making the statement that you literally do not need to have a fundamental understanding of that which you are arguing against. You are furthermore insisting that you have the power of divination, allowing you to know whether or not something is wrong without even knowing what it is.
If I were to say that I don't need to study evolution because I know it's wrong, what would the response likely be? (side note: I have thoroughly researched evolution.) Now, I can say I don't need to study evolution because I don't actually care or I am not interested, but this is merely being willfully ignorant. The statement that I do not have to because I know it's wrong is a different statement - it's a positive claim, an argument for an absolute. I would not be caught dead arguing against something of which I have no knowledge - that the atheist would do this while simultaneously proclaiming his intellectual superiority is astounding.
This is an odd case of special pleading - it's like reverse special pleading. You are insisting that the area of study of theology is unique from any other in that it can be dismissed outright for no real reason. You are presupposing that it is wrong, making a claim without any evidence that it is in fact simply ignorable - for no reason other than "because." Nothing else works this way. There is no area of study or concept where you could claim it to be irrelevant specifically without knowing anything about it. This would get you laughed out of the room for any other idea, so how is it somehow acceptable here?
Most importantly, this statement is an admission of a losing position. You are admitting you lack any understanding of the subject and are therefore not a trustworthy person for any information relating to it. If you make this claim, you are essentially saying, "anything I say about theism, God, and religion is entirely dismissable due to my fundamental lack of understanding surrounding those subjects." Don't be surprised if theists respond to your attempts at using this argument with "K, bye!"
I guess you don't eat shellfish/I guess you stone adulterers/I guess you consider a menstruating woman to be unclean (any citation of an old Mosaic law).
The argument made here is specifically against the religious doctrine of Christianity. This argument is an attempted "gotcha!" by the atheist (or person affiliated with another religion). This argument can be made with any old Mosaic law - those found around Deuteronomy, Leviticus, etc. The idea here is not that the atheist does actually think the Christian does these things, but that the atheist is assuming they do not and that they are, therefore, a bad Christian and/or going to hell etc.
The Answer:
This line of argumentation ignores that the Old Testament and the New Testament are different covenants. The OT was the covenant before Jesus and the NT is the covenant formed by Jesus. The old laws existed so that those who believed in the promises of God could demonstrate their devotion to Him and trust in His promise through physical rituals.
Once Jesus came, the new covenant was created, replacing the old one - as in, it doesn't apply anymore. Jesus changed the rules dramatically - some notable changes were allowing anyone to enter the kingdom of Heaven through faith in Jesus (before it was just the chosen people, the Jews), establishing the law as a matter of the heart rather than just physical law (it's not enough to just not physically sin, it becomes a matter of intention) and the "new" commandment (love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself).
The misunderstanding that the OT and NT are different covenants leads to many other kinds of misunderstandings about the contents of the bible. For example, the physical law to stone adulterers is not contradicted by Jesus not stoning the adulterer who was brought before Him - He was establishing a new covenant, a new law, therefore the old is overwritten by the new - there is no contradiction as no one is attempting to say that they are both true at the same time.
Jesus didn't come to abolish the old law, it says so right in the bible!
The atheist (or person of other religion) attempts to use this argument as proof that the Old Testament, and therefore its old Mosaic laws, are in fact still applicable to Christians today - thus, we can't eat shellfish or wear clothing of mixed fabrics and should stone adulterers. The argument comes with the quotation of Matthew 5:17, though usually not the entire verse. It is not uncommon to see the quotation...
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets
This is an interesting case of taking a bible verse out of context, as it's not even the end of the sentence.
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. - Matthew 5:17
Even when admitting the full verse, atheists will still attempt to argue that this verse is actually proving that the old laws of the Old Testament are still active today.
The Answer:
This argument ironically takes the very passage that establishes that the old law is no longer applicable and attempts to proclaim that it says the opposite.
This argument, as mentioned, attempts to take this verse out of context and willfully distorts the meanings of the words used. What is in fact being said here is that, yes, Jesus did not come to abolish the old law - the old law cannot be abolished, if it were, it would have been arbitrary and therefore meaningless. He came to fulfill it. This misunderstanding is somewhat understandable because this is not the terminology we would use today to explain the concept that is being described here. What Jesus is saying is that the requirements of the old law are being fulfilled by Him - as in, the reason they were necessary is being filled in with Jesus. We no longer need to live by the old law, the old law being the way in which we demonstrated our faith in God's promise, because God's promise is here in Jesus. Now that God's promise, Jesus, has come, the old law's purpose has been fulfilled.
Another wording of this explanation, the reason we were commanded not to eat shellfish and wear mixed fibers etc. was an attempt at being clean of sin - they were the laws by which we could attain salvation (through demonstrating our trust in God's promise). But now, Jesus is our salvation - He has cleaned us of sin. He fulfilled the purposes of the old laws - they are no longer necessary.
Furthering that, there are more instances than just this one passage of the usage of having the law being fulfilled through Jesus in the bible, and none proclaiming the opposite. For instance, Romans 8:3-4:
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
The law was unable to cleanse us because we, as a broken people, are sinful. We couldn't possibly fulfill the law on our own, so God sent Jesus, who lived a sinless and perfect life, to fulfill that law for us as we could not do it on our own. If we accept God's free gift, and walk in the spirit with Him, we will be saved through Jesus' sacrifice. I.e., basically the entire base message of Christianity. It's hard to imagine that a lone atheist on the internet managed to dismantle the core concept of Christianity with one half of a bible verse. To make that a little more clear: if the old laws were indeed not fulfilled, that would nullify the entire reason behind Jesus having come in the first place. Since it's made very clear many, many times why Jesus came and what His sacrifice did for us, then it's safe to say that the old law has indeed been fulfilled through Him. That was literally the point of Jesus.
General concepts of argumentation:
Dismissing evidence for God without explanation.
This position stems from the atheist's belief that his stance is a negative claim that does not need to be proven and it's the theist's job to provide evidence for God, which the atheist presupposes will not happen and therefore denies anything presented as evidence. This practice flies in the face of how earnest debate is meant to occur. If you use this chain of thought, you are not winning the argument. You are willfully and volitionally taking on a position of ignorance and insincerity.
The Answer:
You do not prove you're correct by telling someone else "you are wrong." If you wish to engage in any sincere form of debate, you must refute claims that you don't believe to be true. For example, in responding to a theist's logical argument for the existence of God (the cosmological, for example) a response like, "That's ridiculous," has done effectively nothing. If you wish to take on a negative position at first, go ahead. But as soon as someone makes a positive claim, you cannot refute that claim by simply saying it is not a claim. The claim must be refuted or you are not debating - you are just being bullheaded. Saying "that's not convincing," "that's not evidence," "that's illogical/irrational," "that's/you're stupid," are not arguments. You have proven nothing - you are committing the same error you are accusing the theist of committing, that is, making claims without evidence.
By engaging in behavior this way, you are ignoring the realities of logic and debate. A logical argument must be proven to be sound or unsound, the premises must be true or untrue. You don't prove that they are untrue by saying, "that isn't true." You have to provide some sort of refutation to the claim in order to have any validity. Failure to refute a claim means that it has been unchallenged. An unchallenged claim, in an actual debate, is typically a "win" for the person making the claim.
This applies to everything. If I claim the earth is flat (I do not believe this, just to get that out of the way), you don't prove that I'm wrong by calling me a crazy idiot. If a crazy idiot said the earth was round, would he be wrong? You must provide refutations to the claims for evidence that the earth is flat or you must provide evidence that the earth is not flat, or else the claims that the earth is flat have been unchallenged. To explain further here, you do not have to engage the arguments being made, but if you desire to debate and make reasonable arguments for your position, you do not so so by simply dismissing the argument. What I am explaining here is a fundamental aspect of debate in the first place. If you wish to simply call a theist stupid and not engage their arguments, you have the right to do that, but please be aware you are not "winning" the debate when you do so.
Clarifications:
This, of course, doesn't apply if someone simply states a stance without evidence. If someone just says, "The earth is flat," that isn't an argument, it's a statement. However, don't be fooled - an argument like "God is real because the bible is true," is an argument (though an admittedly bad one to start out the gate with).
The claim of evidence is "the bible is true." This is not the statement for which they are arguing, their argument is that "God is real," and their evidence is "the bible is true." If you dismiss this claim, ignore it, call them stupid, or say that it's not evidence, you aren't doing yourself any favors. This argument is entirely sound - if the bible is true, then God most certainly is real due to the claims within the bible! This logic is sound. In order to refute this argument, you must provide evidence or reasoning for their claim, "the bible is true," to be wrong (or, possibly, that the bible doesn't prove God is real even if it is true if you want to go that route). The debate, in this case, on whether or not God is real would focus on the validity of the bible. And, no, the "burden of proof" is not on them to prove the bible is true because that's not their argument, it's their evidence.
That brings up another one...
Anything regarding the "Burden of Proof"
Atheists love to shift the burden of proof as often as possible, and they do so successfully to the unprepared theist. This concept of argumentation generally rests on the atheist's belief that "atheism is the default position" and therefore any claims of anything outside of atheism are claims that are "guilty until proven innocent." The reason why atheism is not a default claim is a somewhat separate debate to have. The focus here is the typical atheist's misunderstanding of what even is the burden of proof.
The Answer:
A legal definition of the burden of proof:
Burden of proof can define the duty placed upon a party to prove or disprove a disputed fact, or it can define which party bears this burden. In criminal cases, the burden of proof is placed on the prosecution, who must demonstrate that the defendant is guilty before a jury may convict him or her. But in some jurisdiction, the defendant has the burden of establishing the existence of certain facts that give rise to a defense, such as the insanity plea. In civil cases, the plaintiff is normally charged with the burden of proof, but the defendant can be required to establish certain defenses.
What we can gather from this is that the prosecutor has the burden of proof. Basically, if you started the argument, you automatically have the burden of proof, regardless of whether you believe your stance is "default" or not. You don't get to start an argument by demanding the theist prove God exists - you don't start an argument by demanding someone else, someone who was not arguing with you until you sparked it, defend themselves. Defend themselves against what? - they haven't said anything. If you wish to sincerely engage with them and question why they believe in God, that's different, but to air drop into a conversation you were not a part of and demand evidence of claims is not how an argument works.
From there, whoever last made a claim with evidence cannot have the burden of proof. You don't get to respond to someone's evidence by telling them that they have to provide further evidence. If you believe their evidence is unsatisfactory, it's now your burden to explain why you feel that way.
This concept of argumentation fails to understand the very basics of debate. Attempting to proclaim that atheism is the default position is special pleading - it is a line of thinking that goes against the very nature of logical discourse. Nowhere else can you inject yourself into a conversation as the instigator, or prosecutor, and demand someone else prove their position - why should atheists be allowed to do this? If you heard someone walking down the street say, "Joe is a total jerk," you can't approach that person and demand they substantiate their claims that Joe is a total jerk. It wasn't even an argument until you started it. The "rules" of argument cannot apply until it becomes an argument.
Getting Philosophical:
To actively make a claim that the burden of proof lies with someone else is, in itself, a positive proof claim that must be backed by evidence. Anyone can turn the tables right around here - whether you're arguing theology or bumper stickers, though it is admittedly quite a tangent. The very nature of making a claim requires evidence - even if your claim is "you have to provide evidence!" You must explain why that person must provide evidence or else your claim is unsubstantiated!
Arguments based off of the concept of science
These arguments revolve around the idea that "science explains everything," "we can only know things through science," "science has made God unnecessary," etc. The atheist is arguing that religion was a placeholder for knowledge - and now that we know how things actually happen, we don't need "God" to explain this. This usually runs off of the idea that ancient people used to blame rain, drought, tornadoes, too much sun, and bad hair days on the wills of God or gods.
The Answer:
Science and religion are not at odds. The belief that there is a war between religion and science, or God and science, is not accurate. Indeed, if God is real, then He created the laws by which our world operates - all the scientific discoveries are just us finally coming to understand the complex ways in which God constructed the world.
What's more interesting is that the one thing science still cannot explain is why anything exists at all without God. All of the scientific information we have about the origins of the universe and how it was created are analogous with a Creator - it all points to an Uncaused First Cause outside of time, space, and matter willing existence into being through a personal action.
Furthermore, science is not the only method through which we can understand the world around us. In fact, there are a great many things that science cannot prove, but we know exist. Science cannot even prove itself - there is no way to test whether or not science exists, or can be trusted, that involve the scientific method.
We can also know things through logic and philosophy. Some things are also self-evident and don't need to be proven through science. Don't get confused, saying something is self-evident does not make it self-evident. A self-evident statement would be along the lines of "I think, therefore I am." Whether or not minds exist cannot be tested scientifically, but they clearly exist - if they did not, we would not be able to think about whether or not they do. This is self-evident.
Indeed, science and God are good friends. The establishment of early science was because of the early Church. The religious should not be afraid of science and the scientific should not be so quick to assume that God did not put into the place the systems we explore through science today.
Fin~
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