Burden of proof

I'm going to respond to a claim made in this:

http://triablogue.blogspot.co.za/2018/02/suppose-all-protestants-thought-alike.html

To take a comparison, consider a typical debate with a village atheist. They lead with a particular reason for rejecting Christianity. If you shoot down their stated reason, it doesn't faze them at all. They just reach into the bag for another reason. You can go down the list, and it makes no difference.

No. The village atheist has no burden of proof. All he needs do is say "convince me". Square one must be non-belief. That's the default. We don't need to give reasons for rejecting Christianity.  That's not a belief that stands "until it can be proved wrong", it's a belief that can only exist in the first place if it can be proved right.

So give us that evidence. How did you arrive at the conclusion Christianity was right. Perhaps it'll be convincing, perhaps you'll reach into the bag and grab another reason. But it's not for atheists to have to justify non-belief.

Two (or more) Ways to Live

Sigh. Two Ways to Live (or 2wtl if you're fashionable) is doing the rounds in churches here in 2018. A quick google search brings one to the website, which seems to date to 2003.

The message at the heart of Christianity is really quite simple -- simple enough to be outlined in a few pages. It is a message from the Bible about God and his son, Jesus. It is about life and death, and the choice that we all face. 

And it all starts with a loving creator God...

Fallacy #1 is obvious, this is a false dilemma. Just ask a Muslim, or Mormon, or Buddhist if the two ways presented by Matthias Media, and Christians generally, are the only two ways. So for someone to believe this, to fall for the false dilemma, they basically have to already believe quite a lot of specifically Christian theology. So there's good old circular reasoning too. 

In my google search, I went to "images" and one of them was totally brilliant in it's lack of self-awareness and irony. It had two little pictures, for living my way or God's way, and the text on the side says "Select by tapping one of the pictures. Or perhaps you feel you need more information before you can decide." It's hard not to laugh. More information? No kidding someone ought to ask for more information! Reason and evidence would be great. I'd love to know how many would tap "my way" just to see what judgmental Bible verse they have to scare you with. It's never okay to present two options as if they are the only two options when they're not. Why isn't there a picture to tap for "I'm not convinced you've met the burden of proof a God exists, let alone your specific God"?

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Fallacy #2 is closely related. The fallacy of presumption. Even within the dichotomy presented, which shouldn't be a dichotomy, there's obfuscation. The options are merely 1.) live my way - rejecting God, waving my rebellious fist in his face! or 2.) live God's way. So even when you don't live God's way, it's still framed as believing God exists but not wanting God to "control our lives". That's a loaded question.

The whole Two Ways to Live could be captured in the question, "have you rebelled against God?" This is like the question often used to illustrate the fallacy, "have you stopped beating your wife?" It's a yes / no question, providing only two options. The question presupposes that you have beaten your wife prior to its asking, as well as presupposing that you have a wife. If you have no wife, or have never beaten your wife, then the question is loaded. The Two Ways to Live presentation is likewise a loaded question for presupposing a god exists, that it's the Christian god, and that you believe in it. Whether the unlucky person evangelized by 2WTL chooses "my way" or "God's way", implicit in either answer is belief in God and the accuracy and reliability of the Bible. Those things need to be proved first.

Also look at the glaring assumption of a "loving creator God". This is intellectual dishonesty at it's worst. The creation story in Genesis 1 is just describing the various components on the commonly held, not divinely revealed, "snow globe" cosmology. The waters above and the waters below? The firmament? The stars in the firmament? The fact a few days passed before the sun was created? There are unmissable clues that this isn't describing reality. Two Ways to Live falls at the first hurdle with the assumptions it makes. There's nothing special about Genesis 1 among the hundreds of creation myths we know about. Maybe the loving creator god is Aztec? Their myth is no worse. The Jewish view of the cosmology is no different from other cultures. There's no sign it's divinely inspired. Christians need firmer foundations for an evangelizing presentation that wants to rearrange someone else's life.

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Some false dilemmas are not as problematic. But this one is. In some churches, Christians are learning this Two Ways to Live by rote as an evangelizing tool. Somewhere, someone will be put on the spot with the expectation they'll change their whole life (because why would you choose eternal damnation?). This appalls me. Christianity ought to love honesty, but it doesn't. Christians: be ashamed of evangelizing with Two Ways to Live, and stay away from intellectual dishonesty in general. Pretty please.        

Another Mel Gibson Christ movie?

The first one was a big hit at the box office. There was scarcely a Christian who didn't pay to see something they already believed in -- it certainly didn't contain any new information. There's good ol' confirmation bias, the consumption of something vapid because we already knw what it'll say. And a feeling of validation. A big budget Hollywood production that treats a pet belief of many as real history will make Christians feel they're not swivel-eyed lunatics; that they belong; that they're part of mainstream culture. That same dynamic will apply second time around about the alleged resurrection. It's sad because it'll be a thought terminating device. The cultural validation these films give Christians acts as a way to stave off doing any textual criticism. It'll definitely make money.

There are obviously contradictions in the resurrection stories. Other people have covered that well enough:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2012/04/contradictions-in-the-resurrection-account-2/

So we must wait with some curiosity to see which way the film leans on these contradictions. If it were me, I'd have second thoughts about making the resurrection seem like historical fact when it's more reasonable to conclude it isn't. Surely in trying to write a coherent script someone is going to lose their faith? Can we hope?

    

Off-topic Thursday #1

Yes, that's a Sims house. Yes, I built it. It has suffered though many renovations, and looks fairly interesting now. It's quite the departure from worrying about intellectual honesty in religion and etiological myths in the Bible. (I completely apologize to the one reader who didn't see this coming.)

Inescapably, the houses people build are going to be a reflection of their personality. That's the psychologically interesting part. I'm wondering to myself if some apologists would build an imaginary pixel Noah's Ark. I wonder if even in-game they'd never send the kids to school lest they learn about actual science, or never take medicine because of a Big Pharma conspiracy. My guess is that a lot of the psychological baggage we have in the real world carries over into an imaginary one.