David Marshall responds to Loftus's OTF book

For those interested, here. 

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Ridicule, Representation, and the Courtier's Reply: Why Loftus' position is unstable

This is in reply to the Lowder-Loftus exchange. The thread I was responding to is here.

I think you have an unstable position. If people are anything like me, when they hear ridicule, they instantly look for straw men. The more you use ridicule, the more likely your readers, especially those who have been around a little, are going to assume that you are misrepresenting your opponents in order to get ridicule off the ground. If I were to sit here are ridicule evolution, people at this site would immediately start looking for ways in which I don't understand Darwinian biology. So you have to be ready for that. The easy way out of that problem is to use the Courtier's Reply, essentially saying that "Your position is so ridiculous that I don't even have to bother to do my homework and understand it to see how ridiculous it is." Now, you have indicated dissatisfaction with the Courtier's reply, but with the Courtier's reply, you don't have to worry about how accurately you represent your opponent. I suppose it's possible to ridicule something while making a careful effort at representing it correctly, but I have seen only one person come close to doing that, and even he wasn't completely successful. Normally, this isn't done, and so the person whose position is being ridiculed is going to suspect a straw man, and ninety nine times out of a hundred he will be right. I suppose ridicule might persuade a "low information believer," (the equivalent of a low information voter), and I suppose if  you thought the end (of faith) justifies the means, it might be a worthwhile tool. But it strikes me as a dishonest one. As Russell once said in another context, it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

But the context here is not exactly the use of ridicule, but the effort to criticize arguments that support a conclusion one believes in strongly. What you seem to be doing in response to Lowder is criticizing him not because his critiques of your argument aren't good, but because he, as an atheist, should be loyal to the cause and not criticize arguments that support your cherished conclusion, atheism. It's like saying to a Christian who has troubling questions "Are you saved? Do you know Jesus? If you were truly born again, you wouldn't be questioning like this." If I hadn't run into Christians who did NOT respond this way to my questions, I might will have ended up believing what you do now.

Fellow Christian philosophers have criticized William Lane Craig's theistic arguments. Suppose you were to find out the Craig had responded to them by saying "Look, you agree with me that Christianity is true, and people need Jesus. My arguments help people see this. You are taking away from the progress of the Gospel when you criticize my arguments, so you shouldn't be doing that." Wouldn't you consider that to be proof positive that Craig was not an honest scholar?

I don't advocate civility in argumentation because it's nice. That's a point that a lot of people miss. I advocate it because incivility is typically correlated with the misrepresentation of opposing views. The correlation isn't perfect, but from what I have seem it's pretty good. So, the more you ridicule my position, the more my straw man detectors will be out in full force.

Relying on ridicule leads logically to embracing the Courtier's Reply. That's why I call your position unstable. 

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The latest in the Torley-Loftus exchange

Here is the latest in the Torley-Loftus exchange. Or at least until Loftus replies.

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More dialogue with Loftus on faith

Phrases like "thinking exclusively in terms of probabilities" don't get us anywhere unless you are talking to someone who say 'Yes, I believe that not-P is more probable than P, but I believe P anyway, as a matter of faith." Now a thoroughgoing fideist might say something like that, but someone who is that much of a fideist would probably not bother to argue with you. Who you are likely to encounter here are people who think the evidence for their religious beliefs shows their beliefs to be more probable than its contradictory. The idea of faith, to them is simply trusting the one whom they think they have good reason to believe in.


Faith in God is trusting God, and so I don't see any real problem with the concept of faith as commonly used by Christians. The fact that they use such a concept in no way implies that they are closet fideists or anything like that. Someone could have faith in a spouse in a very different epistemic situation, a situation in which the evidence that the spouse is having an affair is very strong, but the person persists in having faith in their spouse nonetheless. Even here there are two scenarios. One of them is where the person says "Yes, the evidence suggests that she's having an affair, but I choose not to believe it." The second is where the person says that the evidence supports their spouse's fidelity. In the first case, you have cause, perhaps, to complain about the "leap of faith" they might be taking. In the second, the person is not taking a leap of faith, they are just misassessing the evidence and the probabilities.

If someone thinks that Christianity is probably true, then it's not going to be much of an issue if you tell them to think in terms of probabilities. If someone is believing that Christianity is true even though their best reasoning tells then the weight of the evidence is against it, then of course you might try to say they shouldn't have faith. If your assessment of the evidence is correct, then "reasonable faith" would not be instantiated anywhere, at least where faith concerns beings like God. But "reasonable faith" would not be an oxymoron, a contradictory concept. The world could have been such that reasonable faith is instantiated. But, on your view, it just doesn't happen to be that way.

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This is a nice critique of Loftus

Loftus says that Satan would be stupid to rebel against God if he were to exist. But, on another post, he says he would not worship an omnipotent being if he were to exist.

From Randal Rauser.

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Loftus Challenges P. Z. Myers

Here.  Actually, I think Loftus occupies a position somewhere between someone like Lowder and people like Myers.

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Understanding, Critique and Ridicule

I had made the claim that while you don't need to understand something in order to reject it, you do need to understand something in order to critique it.

From an exchange on Debunking Christianity.

Robert Corfield: If someone took seriously the flying spaghetti monster and claimed it existed, do you think you would need to study The Gospel of the FSM and make a thorough study of pastafarian theology to make sure you understand the position in order to critique it?

VR: The FSM was invented as a concept that could not be taken seriously by people attacking, in this case, intelligent design (though it does make for a good reply to fideism). Understanding is needed for critique because we need to get inside the intellectual tempation to believe something in order to provide a response that shows that this apparent justification is illusory. No one I know claims to be rationally justified in believing that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. If someone did, we would have to understand why someone thought that--otherwise our critical response is not going to get at what is supporting the belief.
Let's take an example from theistic arguments: various forms of the cosmological argument. People like Dawkins, and Russell before him, presume that you can refute all forms of the cosmological argument by presuming that you can just answer it by asking "Who made God." In other words, they presume that the argument is based on a principle that everything has a cause. The "naive" cosmological argument was attributed to Aquinas as late as 1998, as going as follows, by Theodore Schick.
http://www.infidels.org/librar...

1. Everything is caused by something other than itself2. Therefore the universe was caused by something other than itself.3. The string of causes cannot be infinitely long.4. If the string of causes cannot be infinitely long, there must be a first cause.5. Therefore, there must be a first cause, namely god.
The most telling criticism of this argument is that it is self-refuting. If everything has a cause other than itself, then god must have a cause other than himself. But if god has a cause other than himself, he cannot be the first cause. So if the first premise is true, the conclusion must be false.

But Aquinas never said that, he said that whatever exists contingently needs a cause of its existence. God, by definition, isn't a contingent being, and therefore needs no cause. Now, there could be all sorts of things wrong with this argument, but that isn't it, and making this mistake signals to readers who do know something about this argument that the critic doesn't know what he's talking about. This is particularly of interest because Russell, for example goes on to say that this reply should be so obvious that the fact that people are persuaded by this kind of an argument requires a psychological explanation. Perhaps we need a psychological explanation for why Russell didn't do his homework.

Remember what I pointed out earlier, that it is easy to ridicule evolution. The evolutionist can rightly respond by saying that such ridicule is based on a lack fo understanding. But Christians and defenders of natural theology will say the same thing about misguided attacks.
Creationists, whatever else you might want to say about them, are armed to respond to the tactics of the New Atheists.
http://creation.com/ridicule-t...

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The end of Loftus

He's quitting, at least for the most part.

I have the feeling that there is something problematic about devoting your life to attacking what you are against, as opposed to defending and developing what you are for. I've noticed in showing atheist-theist debates to audiences of students that the atheists in those debates come across as negative and angry. Part of it could be the nature of the position they are taking; they have the job of tearing something down, while the believer is trying to build something up.

But, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, we won't have John Loftus to kick around anymore.

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Nagel, Loftus and future science

This is a response to a Loftus post on Thomas Nagel. 

"Scientifically uninformed philosophy, as opposed to scientifically informed philosophy." How in the world do you draw that distinction, given the fact that any step from science to philosophy is a step outside of the content of the science itself. Science always underdetermines the philosophy. Always, always, always.

Yeah, wait and see what science will do with it. That cannot possibly be present science, it has to be future science. If I think that science will reach a future outcome, I am extrapolating based on present science. But let's look at what science has done in the past century or so. We've gone from Newton to Einstein, Einstein to quantum mechanics, and the rejection of subatomic determinism. Scientists of a prior generation would be shocked at these developments. The mainstream in cosmology has mostly embraced a temporal beginning of the universe, something that theists would have expected to find true, but atheists like Russell would not.

Betting against science?

Here's what you quoted from Wikipedia. (OK, I won't quibble about whether you actually read Nagel, as opposed to getting your information from Wikipedia and Amazon. But, at the end of the day, you have to actually read Nagel to see if you have him right).

Nagel is not a physicalist because he does not believe that an internal

understanding of mental concepts shows them to have the kind of hidden

essence that underpins a scientific identity in, say, chemistry. But his

skepticism is about current physics: he envisages in his most recent

work that people may be close to a scientific breakthrough in

identifying an underlying essence that is neither physical (as people

currently think of the physical), nor functional, nor mental, but such

that it necessitates all three of these ways in which the mind "appears"

to us. The difference between the kind of explanation he rejects and

those that he accepts depends on his understanding of transparency: from

his earliest paper to the most recent Nagel has always insisted that a

prior context is required to make identity statements plausible,

intelligible and transparent.

That doesn't sound like he's betting against science, it looks to me as if he has some expectations about what science will eventually say when it gets done. And his point about a prior context seems to me to be logical in nature.

In order to reject this as impossible, you have to accept something like the Dennettian "no skyhooks" rule as somehow definitive of science, so that, if someone breaks that rule, they are, by definition, not doing science. 
I can easily imagine people out of the 19th Century saying that science can never abandon determinism, and that it can never accept a temporal beginning of the universe. To do so would be to not do science.
I see that here, the whipping boy ID has been brought up. I'm not always happy about what ID supporters have done, particularly where public school issues are concerned. But going all the way back to my days studying the philosophy of science, back when there was just creationism and ID had not been mentioned, I remember concurring with my atheist philosophy of science teacher that almost all of the "in-principle" arguments that creationism could never even possibly be science, were bad arguments.

I'm sure some of you will read into those last comments an endorsement of ID, or creationism, and I suppose nothing will stop you from doing so. But, for the record, I didn't endorse either one.

The present-day materialist may think that present science supports what he takes to be materialism. But, he still must look over his shoulder and ask Carole King's question of future science: "But will you love me tomorrow?"

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Is there a general conception of God?

Here is some discussion on Debunking Christianity.

I had been in a discussion on a prior thread with Cole, who had argued that in the absence of very strong, overwhelming evidence for God (perhaps, the kind that ought to persuade everyone), one should suspend judgment on the existence of God. I had argued that this is existentially impossible. People have to act as if God exists, or not. So, even in the absence of overwhelming evidence, a judgment call is necessary. This choice is partially a matter of evidence, but also can be, at least partially, determined by pragmatic considerations. Now, at this point I was referring to a general conception of God, not a concept that is tied to any revelation or interpretation of that revelation.

John replied by saying:

Yep, Vic is correct. We have to make a choice. We have to live as if Allah exists,
or as if Allah does not exist. There is no neutral position. I mean, what do you really have to lose if you believe and you are wrong? Well, that might differ from person to person. Here I am not talking about heaven and hell, but about the course of life on earth.
Such a provincial argument not even Vic gets it. ;-)

My reply was that:

I believe that Allah exists. Allah is the Arabic word for God, just as Dios is Spanish for God, and Dieu is French for God, and Gott is German for God. I am a theist, therefore, I believe that Allah exists. No problem.

John then said:

Such a typical disingenuous reply that is Vic, unless you are a Muslim. Are you? Do you believe the Koran? Of course you don't.

I then said

No, Muslims are my fellow theists. You are conflating the question of Allah with the question of how Allah might have revealed himself. In point of fact, the word "Allah" was in place as the word for the high god of Arabia before Muhammad picked it up.

If you accept belief in God, then you have to decide whether some revelation is true, or if there was one. But this is no way detracts from the fact that neutrality on the question of God is de facto impossible. You either act as if God existed, or as if God did not exist. You act as if Christianity is true, or as if it was not.

C. S. Lewis accepted theism first, then he had to decide whether or not there was a revelation.

John then said:

But Vic, you don't believe in Allah because Allah revealed himself in the Koran. He is a different god who did different things, has different characteristics, and denies ever doing some of the things your god claims to have done. You don't even believe in Yahweh, the tribal god of the Old Testament. As far as I can tell only a small number of people have ever believed in the god that you believe in. That you share a belief in a creator god with other theists is acknowledged. But when you claim to believe in their gods and they claim to believe in your god that is not in fact the case, since these gods different, sometimes significantly different.
So to say you believe Allah exists is empty disingenuous rhetoric. What you should say instead is that both you and Muslims all believe in a creator god.

He then posted new thread claiming that I had taken a preposterous position, repeating his usual mantra that defending religious beliefs makes smart people look stupid.

I suppose I was replying to his literal words, rather than to what I might have taken his meaning to be. What he meant was the deity revealed in the Qu'ran when he used the word "Allah." I sometimes drive my family members crazy by responding to their literal words and ignoring the obvious subtext.

 But my prior discussion wasn't about a God of any particular revelation, it was simply the idea of a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good. I think there is a general conception of God, and people can subscribe to that notion without adjudicating the question of any particular revelation. C. S. Lewis did this when he became a Theist but not a Christian. John's initial comments are an objection to what I said only if my use of the term "God" made essential reference a Christian conception of God. So, in order to say what he said, he had make an assumption about what I was using the word "God" in a way that referred to a specific revelation. I think there is a general Judeo-Christian conception of God, which is developed in detail in different ways by the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. The word for this being, in Arabic, is Allah. I think you can use the word "God" without indicating whose revelation one accepts. Is there any reason to think my claim here is false? With this in mind, I can't see that my comments were preposterous.

John had to ignore the context of my comments in order for his original criticism to work.

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R D Miksa's blog on taking over the outsider test for faith

Here is the blog. Miksa argues that the OTF, properly interpreted, supports theism, supernaturalism, and intelligent design.

The central issue surrounding the OTF is whether Loftus is justified in putting nonbelief in a special, default category, or whether it is just one more position on the intellectual map, as it were. That's what the Outsider Perspective is supposed to be about. Otherwise I can go outside of Christianity by taking an Islamic perspective, or outside of Buddhism by taking a Christian perspective. Or I get get outside the atheist perspective by taking a Christian point of view.  But there is no question of getting completely outside, in other words, off the intellectual map entirely. You can go outside of here by going there, but you are still going to be somewhere. Wherever you go, there you are.

On the other hand, Loftus isn't just talking about getting outside of where you are to start from somewhere else to see what happens as a thought experiment. Rather, he thinks that the modern scientistic nonbeliever's position just is the Outsider Perspective, and as such it deserves a default status. Unless a religious view can justify itself to someone who adopts that perspective, then it ought not to be believed. But there is no corresponding evidential requirement that falls upon the atheist. One is only justified in getting inside a religious position unless you can justify yourself to The Outsider (with or without the hat).

My criticisms amount to the claim that it's a fudge to put the nonbeliever in that kind of privileged position.

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Reply to Loftus on the argumentum ad Kierkegaard

This kind of reminds me of what I used to call the argument ad Kierkegaard. You can't defend the rationality of Christianity, I've been told,  because Kierkegaard says that Christianity is a leap of faith. So what?
In the Catholic Church, it's actually heresy to be a fideist.

Vatican I, recognizing elements of truth and falsehood in both
rationalism and fideism, adopted a mediating position. Against the
fideists it affirmed that reason, by its natural powers, could establish
the foundations of faith and the credibility of the Christian revelation
(DS 3019, 3033). And against the rationalists Vatican I attributed
the full assurance of the act of faith to the power of divine grace
enlightening the intellect and inspiring the will (DS 3010). The act
was therefore reasonable without being a deliverance of pure reason.--Avery Dulles.
http://www.shu.edu/catholic-mi...

I can play that game too. Here's a Thomas Nagel quote:
It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm
right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there
to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
-Thomas Nagel

See, atheists admit that they are motivated by a fear of religion. Thomas Nagel says so, and he's an atheist. You don't want to let me get away with this? Then you can't use the kind of argument  you're using here.

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Is there Anything to Discuss?

This links to a post typical of Loftus these days. 

Given this set of responses, do you think real dialogue between believers and nonbelievers is even possible? These claims are, at least here, just asserted. It really does look like a dialogue stopper to me. If you say “I don’t have to answer your objections because anyone who defends the position I’m attacking looks stupid whenever they do that,” then I am afraid the parties are left pretty much with nothing left to say.

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