William Lane Craig and Kettle Logic

Willaim Lane Craig debated Bart Ehrman in 2006. I read the transcript soon after this debate ocurred, and just recently listened to it since the audio has become available.

Ehrman brilliantly exposed in Craig what I've heard Robert Price refer to as "Kettle Logic." That is, it doesn't matter if the arguments are consistent with one another. All that matters is that they are pointed at the same target. It would go like this. Suppose I'd borrowed your kettle and I had broken it. When you ask me about it I say "It was broken when I borrowed it, plus it was too weak to hold anything and broke on its own when I filled it, and besides I never borrowed your kettle in the first place." Clearly I'm responsible and will grab any argument to extract myself even if one argument is not consistent with another.

Ehrman exposed this well when he said the following:

But in his own writings he indicates that Mark has a sparse narrative of Jesus being buried and since it's an unembellished narrative, as he calls it, it's more likely then to be historical. I want to know if he still thinks that; that an unembellished tradition is more likely to be historical. Because if that is true, then I want him to tell us whether he thinks that Matthew's more embellished tradition is unhistorical. This is comparable to his comment a few minutes ago that the earliest traditions all agree on something, so we don't have to worry about the later ones. Well, then, tell us, do you think that the later ones are unhistorical?

The Markan passion narrative is more reliable because it is unembellished. That's because unembellished accounts are more reliable and embellished accounts are less reliable. That's a great argument for Craig when it is useful for proving the reliability of Mark. Unfortunately it's not so great for Craig when the same argument is applied to Matthew. But it doesn't matter that this argument is inconsistent with Craig's other opinions. What matters is that it serves Craig's purpose at the moment.

Here is how Craig answered this question in his following rebuttal.

Dr. Ehrman also says, "Is it true that unembellished narratives are more likely to be historical?" I would say yes. This is what his own wish list included, that the earlier the narrative the better. Similarly, the less embellished has a better claim to historical credibility.

This response is pure smokescreen. He's entirely altered the question so that he can defend what is not in dispute. In my mind this was a big score for Ehrman and helped push him to a near draw in the overall debate, or perhaps a close victory.

But Craig scored a rhetorical victory during the debate by once again embracing kettle logic. This time he temporarily embraced a mathematicians tool, only to abandon it when it didn't suit him. That will be the subject of my next post.

Prankster God

I saw this as a Christian and even then this was funny to me. I didn't panic when I heard some foul language and I was old earth, so if you are a Christian and you're the same way you'll probably enjoy this.

Iranian History Lesson

Info for my good friend HP.

Paradigm Shift

I supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq when it occurred in 2003. I voted for Bush twice. I put up a sign in my yard showing my support. The war made a lot of sense to me. Saddam had lost a war with us in 1991, and as a condition of his surrender he had agreed to disarm. All the intelligence agencies indicated that he wasn't disarming. Also 5000 children were dying every month due to U.N. sanctions that deprived kids of medical supplies and food. Starvation is a terrible way to die. I'm a person that is saddened by this type of suffering. I was willing to spend my tax dollars to help. Also, I believed this action would make the world safer. I believed Islam was a little bit crazy. Their doctrines for some reason led them to do strange violent things for seemingly irrational reasons, such as what occurred on 9/11. We needed to stabilize that region.

This was my starting paradigm. But slowly over the next few years certain facts started to undermine this paradigm. The first thing that I recall was the success of the Iraqi soccer team in the 2004 Olympics. I was pleased that they did well, knowing that they wouldn't be taken home and beaten for failure, as would likely occur if Saddam were still in power. President Bush expressed his pleasure at their success. But the players' reaction to Bush astounded me. They attacked him and American foreign policy in Iraq vitriolicly. They seemed to hate us. Those ungrateful bastards!! How can they speak of us this way after all we've done for them? Would they rather be going home to be beaten by Saddam? This made no sense to me. Within my paradigm, that is.

The next step in my shift resulted from contact with some Muslim people. I became friends with a colleague at work from Pakistan. At this point I had abandoned my previous Christian faith, but I said to my Muslim friend "I have to tell you, if I were an alien from another planet and I came to earth and picked a religion simply based upon the behavior of the adherents, I would take Christianity over Islam. Pat Robertson may be crazy, but he's not violent. Same with Falwell or Benny Hinn. You guys are violent. You must be in the wrong." My friend responded by asserting that I am looking at a very narrow window of history. It is true that Islam today appears more violent, in that Middle Eastern countries seem less stable. But consider the last 14 centuries. Islam looks very good in comparison with Christianity when considering that window. Also look at the teachings of the Qur'an. There is no reason to conclude that it is more violent than the Bible. He provided me with some resources to consider his claim. I looked into it.

I found a couple of good PBS documentaries (available at the library) that seemed to confirm his claims. These were Islam: Empire of Faith and The Crusades. Christianity doesn't look so great in comparison to Islam in these videos. I also scoured the internet looking for violent teachings from the Qur'an. I challenged anti-Muslim friends of mine to likewise show that the Qur'an is inordinately violent. There are a few things that aren't great, but certainly no worse than the Bible. One example critics often point to is Sura 9. If you'll look at my comments here, this doesn't really work.

The next component in the evolution of my thinking involved the failure to find WMD in Iraq. Ultimately we want to take military action when there is a threat to our own national security, and WMD was that threat. Without the WMD I started to wonder if this had been a mistake. It was great that people were able to be free, but perhaps if the goal is to make the U.S. and the world safe maybe the half a trillion would have been better spent elsewhere. But I can't blame Bush. The whole world thought he had WMD, as did the Democrats. Perhaps he was wrong, but it wasn't a lie. Bush probably thought he did have them. Still, I have to be unhappy about what Bush did. He may have meant well, but he's the top dog. He has to share some of the blame for this huge blunder. But regardless, we're in Iraq now. We have to finish the job and make the region stable.

My confidence in my Republican president was shaken, but not destroyed. Anybody can make a mistake, and this was an understandable one. Then I watched another show on PBS. Bill Moyer's Buying the War. This was an eye opener. He showed with video clips that this was more than incompetence. This was an effort to persuade us to go to war without good evidence, and the media itself was complicit.

This was very depressing for me. Now I started to think that Bush wasn't just honestly mistaken. He was at best incompetent, and at worst intentionally misleading us. He had gotten us into a war for the wrong reasons. And this war wasn't going well. Deficits were skyrocketing. And there didn't seem to be any good solution. I'm not sure we can afford to continue to fight this war, yet we couldn't just leave. Could we?

Enter Ron Paul at the South Carolina debate. He claimed that they don't attack us because we're free and prosperous. They attack us because we're over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. How would we feel if China built military bases in our country? How would we feel if China overthrew our legitimately elected leaders and installed their own? We need to look at things from the perspective of how we would feel if these things were done to us.

This was a complete revelation. Is he right? I had to look into it. I started to dig into things and Paul's assertions seemed to be true. I learned other things I was unaware of. One fact hit me pretty hard. It was about the starving children in Iraq. It was the U.S. and Britain that had forced this issue. Apparently Madeleine Albright was asked on 60 minutes in '96 whether the half a million dead children (at that point) was worth it. She said it was. This statement, which received widespread coverage in foreign press, was barely mentioned domestically.

And here was the real kick in the crotch. While I was unaware of this until it was needed as an excuse for war, Michael Moore, who in my view was a leftist crackpot, was well aware of it and was breaking laws smuggling food to these poor starving children in the year 2000! How is it that he, as a liberal crazy person, knows about this and is risking much to do something about it, and yet I as a supposedly more enlightened conservative was so in the dark?

What else am I in the dark about? If I'm wrong, someone please correct me, but there are a few other things I stumbled upon that the press didn't talk about that I think they should have talked about.

1-The U.S. initially may have given Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait
2-Bush the Elder justified the war with complete lies about babies in incubators
3-There is a lot of history worth knowing unknown to most Americans regarding our dealings with Iran that truly justifies their hatred of us
4-The U.S. has killed a lot of people without provocation. Consider tiny Laos, an impoverished country. We dropped more bombs on them then were dropped during the entirety of WWII, forcing residents to live in caves.

Due to this and other revelations, my old paradigm had crumbled. Our supposed free press, which in my opinion had to be amongst the best in the world, in fact could not be trusted to inform the people of what the real issues are. The politicians that I had supported were starting wars for reasons that weren't in fact being made clear at the time, and the real motivations simply weren't noble. The country I thought I lived in didn't really exist. I liked thinking that life was as simple as saying that they're the bad guys and we're the good guys. I liked thinking that we were the greatest nation in the world and the world's hatred of us was jealousy and irrationality. That vision of my country is gone now, and it's a sad, sad day.

Mental Health and Truth

I read an interesting book recently called The Road Less Traveled. It's about phsychotherapy. A major premise is that mental illness is often the result of being unwilling to face reality. In our minds we build paradigms that we use to make sense of the world. The facts of life usually assimilate well into our paradigms. But sometimes they don't. When they don't we have a couple of choices. We can either modify our paradigms or we can ignore reality. Modifying your paradigm can be frightening. For a while you may not be able to make sense of the world. This is like traveling without a map. But when you ignore reality you set yourself up for problems that are usually worse.

One example of this in Peck's book was of a woman that was experiencing severe anxiety attacks. She was married and thought of her marriage as a happy one. She said she enjoyed her job as a clerk in a supermarket. She lived modestly, but thought she was happy.

Therapy brought out some realities though. It turned out that she was a very intelligent person, but during college while getting excellent grades she had suddenly dropped out. She immediately married the "boy next door." He was a mechanic. She took her job as a clerk. Then she started to experience these anxiety attacks. It was always when she was alone, without her husband. She would try to get with her husband as soon as possible, and this would help her cope with her fear.

Further realities began to surface. Why had she dropped out of school? She felt like it just wasn't the right place for her. Everyone was into sex and drugs. This was an effront to her Catholic sensibilities and upbringing.

The real problem was this. She had thought that perhaps she wanted to experience a freer lifestyle, with sex and drugs. But this was a challenge to her Catholic paradigm. The thought of changing that paradigm frightened her, so she withdrew and got married. But those fears resurfaced during moments where she was alone and again free. So she needed to face reality and consider changing her paradigm. Maybe freedom to follow ones desires isn't always so bad, as the Catholic church might suggest.

Ultimately she realized that perhaps she wasn't so happy in her marriage. Her husbands' lack of ambition annoyed her. She conquered her fears and returned to college. This was followed by more financial success. Her husband also became more ambitious and also returned to school. But the woman was forced to shift her Catholic paradigm in order for this to happen.

My own experience was like that somewhat. When I first discovered apologetics it was great. I was voracious in my appetite for knowledge. The more I learned the more it confirmed the paradigm that I already held. But that study lead to other truths that didn't assimilate well into my paradigm. I tried to fight through them, but struggled. I withdrew. I stopped studying Christianity. But I still went to church and I continued to hear the Bible. Every now and then problems with the Bible would again become evident to me. I continued to try to ignore them, but this all came crashing down one day and I resolved to face this issue. But I didn't. I continued to ignore it for a year or so until finally my own conscience demanded it. I faced the issue desiring still to sustain my Christian paradigm, but with a willingness to change it if the facts demanded. And the facts did demand. I changed my view, and in the process probably staved off mental illness.

I've been going through another paradigm shift over the last few months. That will be the subject of my next post.

Science vs Creationism

Fun video.



HT Pharyngula

I'm not so sure about this country I live in anymore

I have a friend from Pakistan that I talk with often. I've learned a lot about life in Pakistan since meeting this person. Media is state controlled. Elections are bought and paid for. How odd it would be to live in a world like that, where the free expression of ideas and free elections really weren't available.

But I'm starting to notice things in this current election that are starting to make me wonder.

I watched the Republican debate Saturday. There is one candidate that does not take corporate donations, has never taken lobbyist money in 20 years of congressional service, and so he obviously doesn't have corporate backing. To me he looked like a man amongst boys, but I will admit I'm liberterian, so obviously I prefer him. I'm of course talking about Ron Paul. He was involved in a few of the heated exchanges, so he certainly made the debate interesting.

But the post debate coverage was a little strange. I think it was Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopolous. They started by speaking with reporters from the camps of each candidate to get the candidates spin on the debate. They spoke with 5 reporters and excluded the spin from only 1 candidate. Ron Paul.

This debate was sponsored by facebook, and if you know about facebook and myspace you know that Ron Paul owns both. He is far and away the favorite Republican candidate amongst facebook users. Diane Sawyer said "Let's see what facebook users are saying." The first of two questions on facebook asked which candidate was most presidential. Ron Paul was winning handily. The second question asked which issue was of greatest concern. Most respondents indicated that it was the economy. Comments were streaming in. Most were about Ron Paul. How did ABC describe what was happening on facebook? They mentioned the results of the economy question and mentioned a couple of generic comments that had nothing to do with any particular candidate.

In fact, Ron Paul's name was never spoken. I noticed on facebook that the initial two polling questions about who was most presidential and the one about the economy were removed and replaced with a single poll question which asked "What was the biggest surprise of the night?" There were 5 options, each having to do with one of the Republican candidates, except one. Ron Paul. What is going on here? Why is he not being mentioned?

In last night's debate on Fox in NH Paul was excluded. Paul is polling near third in NH, and with the selection process just now getting underway he's certainly a viable candidate. The NH Republican Party thought so, and they withdrew their support from the debate because of Paul's exclusion. Fox didn't let this stop them as they declared at the beginning of the debate "One of these 5 candidates will be the Republican nominee."

I pay less attention to the Democratic side of things, but from what I can see things look pretty similar. I watched Bill Moyers interview Dennis Kucinich. He pointed out that the magazine The Nation declares that the person that truly embodies the values true Democrats is Kucinich. I know a lot of liberals, and they all love Kucinich. In fact, most of them either despise Hillary or simply are not thrilled about her. Yet Hillary seems to be the de facto nominee. Even when she loses the caucus in Iowa most of the resulting coverage is about her. John Edwards, who took 2nd in Iowa, seems to be barely mentioned. Is it any coincidence that Hillary has more corporate donations than any other candidate?

Fascism is defined in different ways. One way says that corporations are simply wedded to the government. Government bails them out when necessary, imposes regulations that help exclude competition, etc, and corporations return the favor by dolling out the money by lobbying and contributing to campaigns. Hillary and Guiliani play this game very well, and get a lot of coverage despite the fact that the American people don't seem too thrilled about either, whereas Paul and Kucinich don't play this game, and they can't seem to break through the media stranglehold. Paul and Kucinich both do very well in the unregulated media (the internet) and not so well in the media that is owned by large defense contractors (NBC), and other huge corporate giants (ABC, Fox, CBS). Is the U.S. really all that different from Pakistan? I'm afraid I'm not so sure.