The best new theist book or argument?

I've seen a Catholic ask the reverse about new atheist books, so it's a fair question. Theists of course do so as a prelude to dismissing all new atheist books as not worth the time to read them. Confirmation bias.

But what would a new book on creationism even look like? The memoirs of Ken Ham? It's been a while since any new philosophical argument for God was proposed, and even then, arguing the existence of "a deity" is not quite the same as a rigorous and scientific demonstration that the particularly Roman Catholic god is the true one. This is not even the same god as the Protestant one. --The Catholic one sent Jesus to die, but thousands of years later still isn't sure why that had to happen. After all justification isn't by faith, it's by baptism. Sanctifying grace is drip fed through the sacraments ex opere operato, and the perfect innocence of Jesus isn't imputed to Catholics either (and definitely not through faith), so they have to go through Purgatory. The substitutionary death of Christ (and that's clearly how the story is intended, fictional as it may be) has no place in Catholicism. This is an entirely different plan to the god of Protestants. So if a Catholic philosopher / theologian were to come up with a book that "proved" the existence of God... which god? If a Protestant philosopher / theologian had a book that proved the existence of God... which god?

None of these arguments for the plausibility of a deity gives us access to the mind and personality and objectives of that deity. The grounds for believing any particular religion is still zero.

Feser's double standards

Ed Feser is a name I've come across in the past, and out of curiosity I googled and found his blog. A post that mentioned "New Atheism" was catnip to me, and I could not but help wondering how a known polemicist like him would calmly deal with it.

In that post he links to a review of a book called Faith versus Fact by Jerry Coyne. As book reviews go it's little more than a hasty smear job. We know from the start that some readers of such books aren't saying in their minds "okay, convince me" but actively looking for things to complain about. I'm sure Feser has had atheists read his books like that too. A whole gaggle of cognitive biases are protecting us from questioning deeply held beliefs.

It's a case of dramatic irony that Feser titles his review "An Omnibus of Fallacies". I'm sure he means the book, not his own review of it.

Example 1.

When churchmen refuse to abandon some doctrine, Coyne tells us that this shows that religion is dogmatic and unwilling to adjust itself to modern knowledge. When churchmen do abandon some doctrine, Coyne tells us that this shows that religion is unfalsifiable and desperate to adjust itself to modern knowledge. It seems Coyne also missed that lecture in logic class about the fallacy of special pleading.

No, Feser that's called a dilemma, not special pleading. And it's not a dilemma for Coyne, it's one for you. Religions are slow to adjust to modern knowledge. For centuries, geocentricism was believed - the cosmology in the Bible is a flat earth snow globe, stars were in the solid sky above earth and even the god of the Bible has that view - and when more and greater knowledge of how the cosmos was actually arranged there was some cognitive dissonance that took some time to reconcile. It undermined the religions that had "known" geocentricism was true because of what unreliable holy texts said. What is true, and even how we know what is true, became a live issue. Eventually the cognitive dissonance was resolved by reducing the importance of geocentricism to religion. Oh the churchmen may have rearranged their thoughts to their satisfaction, but outsiders have every right to call them out on that change in doctrine and ask why it doesn't falsify the religion. That's the dilemma. This is Sagan's "dragon in my garage" all over. We know, empirically, the visible institution that calls itself the Roman Catholic Church is neither unified, nor holy, nor demonstrably apostolic in it's doctrines. Yet no amount of disunity, of evil, of doctrinal accretions unknown in the first 1000 years of it's history counts against the magnificent Roman Catholic Church as one, holy, and apostolic. That's what unfalsifiable looks like. If your religion is true, then you can't have it both ways. Either dogmatically cling to geocentricism and flat earth nonsense and Noah's ark and die on that hill for that belief, or adjust to modern knowledge and accept that it falsifies your religion. Feser and believers like him want us to respect religion even as it vacillates in the face of actual empirical evidence, which at no point can call into question the impervious idealized religion he holds.    

Example 2.

... Nor is “religion” the only term Coyne uses in a tendentious way. The question-begging definition is perhaps his favorite debating trick. He characterizes “faith” as “belief without—or in the face of—evidence” and repeatedly uses the term as if this is what it generally means in religious contexts. Naturally, he has no trouble showing that faith so understood is irrational. But this simply is not how faith is understood historically in Christian theology. For example, for scholastic theologians, faith is assent to something that has been revealed by God. And how do we know that God exists and really has revealed it? Those are claims for which, the theologian agrees, evidence needs to be given.

That's half a dozen fallacies. Feser is equivocating. So instead of saying as Coyne does that "faith is believing something [without evidence]", now faith is "assent to something [revealed by God]" -- those bracketed clauses are equivalent. Lets not kid ourselves, "revealed by God" is a faith claim for which there is probably no evidence. And if we take him at his word, presumably Feser doesn't give religiously assent to anything he can't prove was revealed by God. He must believe very little.

So Feser might say faith is assent to dogmas like the Immaculate Conception, but believing the content of that proposition does nothing to address the epistemological question of how-do-you-know-it's-true? Any grain of intellectual honesty should be enough for him to admit there are many things, many of these supposed divine revelations, that he takes on faith - no more than an ipse dixit table thump from Rome. Which is of course ironic when he recoils at being painted with that brush by Coyne. "No!", says Feser. "Of course we agree we need evidence for what we believe! That is not in dispute!" Really? How far may I prod your beliefs before you run out of evidence and all you have is hearsay? This is exactly Coyne's point. As a Catholic, Feser must perforce believe in just the manner Coyne says.

This type of thinking is what chips away at the faith of rational, critical thinking people who observe quietly from a distance. Seeing theologians, and ministers, and bishops, and religious philosophers lack any self-awareness, seeing them defend the faith with double standards and lack of clarity.

To Alvin Plantinga, supernaturalism is self-refuting

So there are those people who think the physical world is all we know or all we have access to, and lets call that naturalism. Some folk are supernaturalists. This group would include you, Alvin. And among those who believe in the supernatural, a concomitant belief is creationism. After all, once you believe in a God, then pulling a "God did it" explanation out the hat with dizzying frequency is to be expected. Some believers grab this explanation in virtually every situation of life, but all can be expected to use it to fill in the blanks when answering the big questions of existence. Because God. This is just a long way of saying where you get supernaturalism, you get Creationism - that humans are specially made by God, every aspect of human physiology and psychology is designed and not the result of survival of the fittest. No scientific enquiry needed, just believe God made you.

Alvin Plantinga argues, and has done for many years, that our cognitive faculties can't be relied on if they are a consequences of evolution because evolution is only interested in selecting for preferred behavior -- there could be any number of ways our beliefs are wrong, but they produce behavior that aids survivability. And this disconnect ought to undermine our confidence in naturalism itself because that is also something concluded with the same flawed cognitive faculties.

It would be a shame if supernaturalism had a similar problem. And it does. Given God-breathed creation is not like evolution, our cognitive faculties in this scenario are far more reliable. 1.) God is not a deceiver. 2.) There is no 'millions of years' timeframe that suggests the traits that survive are simply those that produce survivability, not necessarily truth. 3.) God is Truth, with a capital T.

Therefore Plantinga's supernaturalism is self-defeating. Because if naturalism must be thrown out for dubious cognitive faculties (in my head I've got some replies to his concerns, but maybe that's for another day), supernaturalism -- which is what Plantinga thinks is truly the case -- with it's superior cognitive reliability (because God made us in his image!), ironically gives us the ability to understand the world without any reference to supernaturalism at all. God in Plantinga's theology is not a deceiver (that would be Satan) so we can trust our cognitive abilities; and God won't play hard-to-get, so the fact we have no concrete evidence for anything supernatural must be evidence against supernaturalism.

Given the extraordinary trust we can have in cognitive faculties if supernaturalism / creationism is true, and given how God would want us humans to have a "map that reflects the territory", we'd expect proportionally more scientists and philosophers - the women and men most trained and disciplined in rational thoughts - to use these amazing cognitive faculties to unmask God. In this scenario the supernatural is true and cognitive faculties are mostly reliable, so the best and brightest ought to believe the supernatural is true. The reality is the opposite. More scientists and philosophers are atheists. These are the exact people who don't take the conclusion for granted, who are inquisitive, who would accept evidence for God if it was there... but find nothing. There are many phenomena that have in past ages been seen as supernatural. Ancient Romans saw a comet and believed it was Julius Caesar. For anything strange the answer was always "the gods did it!". In our rational scientific world, we can look back and see the explanation was never supernatural. Thank you Alvin for shoring up our cognitive faculties, but it does too much. The conclusion that we come to using those beautiful minds is: the answer has never been magic. 

In fact, in addition to asking whether supernaturalism is actually true, we see how merely the belief in the supernatural is a thought-stopping technique. Even Isaac Newton, in his understanding of planetary systems and stars and orbits and the cosmos generally, gets to a point where he takes the intellectual shortcut and says, "it's sustained by divine power". He had some very wrong ideas about space, but supernaturalism allowed him to say "God did it". That, and not atheism, to me looks like unreliable cognitive faculties. He had wrong beliefs about the world because of his belief. Newton's case can be demonstrated a hundred-fold among believers. It seems the surest way to hold a wrong belief is to be incurious about it, epitomized by those who appeal to a God and have no need to look further. -It would detract from God if they questioned the "God did it" explanation; it would demonstrate unbelief. Plantinga worries about a system that generates beliefs that can't be trusted to reflect the real world, and he needs to look in the mirror.  

Making the data fit the theory

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." - Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia

I'll respond to some problems of rational thought in this. He does nail the draw of Catholicism. The social stability is a huge part of it.

https://medium.com/@MatthewSchultz/why-stay-protestant-435b5e1006a0

But first it's worth saying why such a piece interests me.

I grew up Protestant. Specifically in the fairly liturgical Church of England in South Africa (lately renamed to REACH: Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of Southern Africa) that, when my father leads the service at least, still uses the Prayer Book - analogous to a Catholic missal. The type you'll find in the pews is the soft cover variety, but on a book shelf close by is my very own Prayer Book in hard cover form, probably signed by the bishop. (I'm guessing. I don't really care enough to look. These are my confessions.) It's still a pretty Thing, either way. My family at various times have wished I'd go into the ministry.

On the Catholic side, some of my constant friends through childhood (not that religion was ever discussed) were Catholics. Nay, even more: they are SSPX Catholics. Some years later, and through these friends, I got to know a girl who is also SSPX. With a crazy and beautiful sense of humour with whom I could share my latent interest in growing roses and Gilbert & Sullivan and everything else besides, without it being weird. So the Catholic question became important to me. By this time I had already completed my degree in philosophy, and despite that equipping me with good mental tools I was still naïve and uncritical of my religion and loyally Protestant. I literally didn't even know that Catholics think their church was founded on Peter. (As an aside, Catholics catastrophically fail to understand the concept of the Church as Protestants do. For what it's worth, the Protestant doctrine is more biblical. But that's a vacuous truth that amounts to no more than being right about Dickens' use of the Meagles family in Little Dorrit.)

The above link is therefore interesting to me. It's a debate I'm familiar with. I'm curious to see how other Protestants, though I no longer identify as one, deal with Catholicism; and how they rationalize being Christian.

------

From the link above, this is what intellectual dishonesty looks like:

... As a Protestant, I have two basic options when informing my study of the Bible. The first is consulting scholars who think the text is inspired and more or less inerrant. This comes with arguments or assumptions about the nature and quality of the Bible’s authorship: Matthew really did write Matthew, the disciples' memory of Jesus’s teachings is entirely or almost entirely accurate, Jesus really did make accurate prophecies, he really did miracles as described, and so forth.

The other option is consulting scholars who doubt or actively disbelieve all of the above propositions. They approach the text with a hermeneutic of suspicion. They doubt Matthew wrote Matthew. They doubt Jesus said and taught everything ascribed to him. Many claim that Jesus’s teachings were issued as a fallible man: given perhaps as a (mostly) good man, but certainly not as a divinely inspired God-man.

When it comes to Catholicism, most or all of the NT Catholic scholars I’m aware of fall somewhere in the second camp. Why would I follow a denomination that approves of or passes over scholars within its own ranks that seem to deny or doubt the reliability and authority of the Bible on such a regular basis? ...

If we look at the comment on the authorship of Matthew, as one example, see how that just begs the question: how does anyone come to this view of the Bible absent any textual criticism? Is it rational to collect all the thousands of religious writings from all ages and all cultures, put a blindfold on, choose one, and then cling to it as "the Truth"? Surely not. So by what principle should anyone believe the authority of the Bible if not through the means here rejected? What if in the structure of the text we see telltale signs that it isn't real history? The mentality quoted above reminds me of Aquinas, and Bertrand Russell's critique of him:

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. 

Why listen to scholars who question the Bible? Because that's what curiosity is. Because that's the only way to know if you're throwing you life away believing a lie or not. Because if truth matters we don't presume we know everything and stick out fingers in our ears to block out anything that contradicts it. I can assure all believers that groups like the Branch Davidians or the Mormons also said and say among themselves "why would I follow anyone that questions the authority of what I know is true?" It's transparent confirmation bias: I'll only listen to those who agree with me. Yeah, but what if you're wrong?

If we want to believe more right things and fewer wrong things we don't start with the theory, we start with the data. And that's why scholars who don't presume the conclusion at the start are worth listening to.

Just-so stories

Like Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, but for adults.

The creation story in Genesis 1 is an etiological myth, and so is the Tower of Babel in explaining where languages come from, and so is Genesis' explanation of why some animals are striped and some are flecked. The paragraph starting at Genesis 30:37 is lightly terrifying. An etiological myth is that type of nonsense story that tells how something came about. From the Greek aitiología, "giving a reason for" (αἰτία, aitía, "cause"; and -λογία, -logía). As an aside, Toyota sell a device called the Etios here, for which we cannot give a reason either. They're not just nonsense stories, they're thought-terminating. They've investigative dead-ends. They're the antithesis of curiosity, of actually understanding the world. It amounts to: here is an explanation, believe it. That's it. Done. Of course Rudyard Kipling didn't expect anyone to actually believe his story about "How The Leopard Got His Spots". But the Bible version of that in Genesis 30 is "infallibly true"... apparently. Not sure in what way it can be true, but that's no longer mental gymnastics I need to do.

In South Africa right now - apart from the imminent departure of a desperately corrupt president - the big concern is the drought in Cape Town. It's going to become the first modern-day city to run out of water. The panic is real. One figure I've heard quotes is that 60% of Cape Town residents are not attempting to save water. Which is a little bizarre for non-believers, but sadly expected among Christians. There are many promises in the Bible, purportedly said by the son of God himself, that you'll get whatever you ask for in prayer.

John 15:16. "... whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you." There's no condition attached.

John 14:14. "You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." Again, no condition.

Matthew 21:22. "If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."

There is a slight theological difference in Matt 21:22 because it's a qualified statement: if you believe. But don't tell me none of the people who fasted and prayed for the marriage equality bill in Australia to fail last year were true believers, or Angus Buchan who prayed for rain here.

So there are these promises that we know don't square with reality. Yet they are believed and acted on. The just-so stories are not only those nonsense ones in the Old Testament, that style of thinking is in the way believers "give a reason for" what they think or do. In the water crisis, many Christians aren't saving any water. When Day Zero arrives they will turn on the taps and say "I believe", as if that'll do anything. And the etiology for this is "the Bible says so". Sure, I agree the Bible says God will supply all your needs, and not to worry, and that you'll get whatever you ask for in prayer. But we also know that you don't get everything you ask for. On a spectrum between truth an lie, what Jesus said is more of a lie by any standard definition. So is saying "the Bible says so" good enough?

And how did Jesus fail to realize what he said wasn't true?

Is Matthew 6:25-27 right?

That passage runs thusly:

25“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? 26Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

Which I'm sure I took at face value when I heard that first. It seems reasonable at first blush. But I have vague memories, still from childhood, in the parking lot waiting for my sister to finish her ballet class, learning that neurotic stressed-out people can live longer. Perhaps from some radio talk show.

To move back to the present, some quick googling suggests that maybe Jesus didn't know what he was talking about. 

http://time.com/4872545/neurotic-longer-life/

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/worry-more-live-longer-1668202.html

I know how Christians like to say "ah! But the Bible isn't meant to be a science text book!", but that misses the point. If we stretch credulity and take the gospels as accurately recording Jesus' direct speech -- a remarkable assumption given the space of time between the alleged events and when the gospels were written -- then simply put: why doesn't Jesus know better? This impinges on God's omniscience. 

In The Beginning...

The evolution vs creationism debate is a non-starter to me.

I come from a family -- this is South Africa -- where old Kent Hovind DVDs are shown at Bible studies. I was aghast, and pointed out that even within the Creationism movement others don't want to touch his arguments with a barge pole. Nevertheless, I was assured by people who have never taken the time to question their assumptions, who have never done any textual criticism the science was good. Of a Kent Hovind DVD. And that touches on various cognitive biases, which is for another day.

That literalist reading of Genesis is just par for the course. Yes, there are theistic evolutionists, and the day / age creationists, but they're all making a similar mistake. Usually the Christian who believes evolution doesn't pay attention to the detail of the text. And the Christian who says "ah, but a day might be an age for God, so we don't need to commit ourselves to young earth creationism". The mistake is similar in that neither of them are starting with what the text actually says, they're starting with the belief.

Having begun with the belief, everything after that -- all the creation "science" -- is ad hoc rationalization. It's a just-so story. And that's frustrating because it doesn't tell us anything about how they moved from the starting point of not-having-the-belief to the next stage of having-the-belief. The most important step is skipped over, and the current belief simply taken for granted. A big part of my journey out of believing nonsense was seeing how irrationally constructed beliefs were. It was disappointing to have no example of a Christian being able to "give a reason for the hope he / she has" (1 Peter 3:15) while being intellectually honest.

What Genesis 1 is (somehow the conflicting creation account in Genesis 2 isn't dealt with nearly as often, let alone explained why we have two; and if both are God breathed why are there also two genealogies of Seth, and two of Shem, and two covenants with Abraham, and two revelations to Jacob at Bethel, two calls to Moses to rescue the Israelites from Egypt, two sets of laws at Sinai, and two accounts of the Tabernacle/Tent of Meeting)... what Genesis 1 is, is unremarkable. Last year I
came across a trio of papers by Paul H Seely - The Firmament and the Waters Above in two parts (link to part 1 here), and The Geographical Meaning of "Earth" and "Seas" in Genesis 1:10 - published in the Westminster Theological Journal.

Obviously Paul Seely is not like the Ken Hams of the world. He looks at the text and sees it as it is. The firmament is, beyond reasonable doubt, meant as a solid thing just like all the surrounding cultures believed. Put it this way: a writer not inspired by God would have believed and written the same thing. The waters above and waters below also map onto a typical ancient cosmology. We know Genesis 1 doesn't describe anything unique, and we know what it's describing isn't true. At that point, anyone's belief should collapse if they're intellectually honest. And that's where Seely runs out of courage. At the last, despite, and contrary to all the evidence he presents, he still insists that Genesis is infallibly true. Hey, it was in the WTJ -- did we expect it was going to end differently? That's grand, but now we're calling a text inspired that is no different from if it wasn't inspired. A distinction without a difference. Other ancient societies also believed in a solid sky without this amazing revelation from God - are they infallibly true? If anyone can call Genesis true with a straight face, then they've emptied "true" of all meaning.

You can only have the evolution / creation debate if you've not taken the time to understand the text on its on terms first. I fully expect that debate to continue.