The Priority of Life-Rights Thesis

One thing that is never clearly stated in the abortion controversy, but underlies a lot of the discussion, is what I would call the Priority of Life-Rights Thesis, or PLT. That is, while some rights can be overriden in order to protect other rights, when a life-right is at stake, that life-right always must be defended by the force of law, and all other rights (quality of life rights, privacy rights, etc), have to take a back seat to life rights. To some people, this is so obvious as to not even need argumentation or defense. Hence, once you call something murder, it is somehow logically incoherent to be against making it illegal. By murder, here, I will waive the question of criminal intent, and simply define it as homicide without adequate moral justification.


As a philosopher, I see this as a loose end in the discussion that bothers me. How should it be defended, or should it?

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The ending to my Infidels paper on miracles.

The paper is here.

If my foregoing discussion is correct, opponents of, say, the resurrection of Jesus cannot appeal to a general theory of probability to prove that anyone who accepts the resurrection is being irrational. It is also a consequence that different people can reasonably expected to have different credence functions with respect to Christian (and other) miracle claims. If you want to convince some people that Christ was resurrected, you have a much heavier burden of proof than you have in convincing others. It must be noted that there is no way, on the model I have presented, to show that everyone who denies the Resurrection is irrational, or engaged in bad faith. Of course, one can still believe that unbelievers disbelieve because of "sin" or "suppressing the truth," or what have you. But given the legitimate differences that can exist concerning the antecedent probability of the miraculous, I don't see how such charges can be defended. So the lesson here, I think, is that both apologetics and anti-apologetics should be engaged in persuasion, not coercion, and that the attempt to ground irrationality charges against one's opponents is a misguided enterprise.[22]

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How liberal is Obama?

Not very, according to Eric Alterman.

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Leaping over the evidence with a single bound

(Premise) Stephen Law argues that "Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity." (Believing Bullshit, p. 75).


(Conclusion)  Because of this it is essential that we think exclusively in terms of probabilities, the probabilities of a non-believer in all extraordinary claims, that is, the concrete examples I have given.

This strikes me as a leap of logic commensurate with Kierkegaard's leap of faith.


 

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Immateriality and Intentionality

A paper by Gerald Casey.

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Who Made God and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

The argument doesn't say everything has a cause. What it says is whatever begins to exist must have a cause of its existence. Scientific evidence says that the universe began to exist, and so it needs a cause of its existence. God by definition did not begin to exist, therefore, he needs no cause of his existence.

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But how shall we follow probabilities?

Loftus: We should think exclusively in terms of the probabilities.


VR: How in blazes do you calculate probabilities? Probability theory tells you how you get from a prior probability to a posterior probability. What it does not tell you is what prior probabilities are correct. Hence I can begin with a probability of 1 for the Resurrection and end up with a probability of 1 for the resurrection. Ditto for a probability of zero. So telling me to think exclusively in terms of probabilities tells me squat. Probability theory does tell you how, given enough evidence and a small enough split between probabilities, we can come to an agreement about whether something is true or not. But if there is a large split between antecedent probabilities, we can easily have rational people taking opposite beliefs to their graves.

I happen to think that there are no right or wrong antecedent probabilities. We start with the probabilities we have and go from there. My view is that a Bayesian-rational person can conclude that Jesus rose from the dead.

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