There. Somebody said it!

Exactly what people swear up and down that Dawkins never said. 

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.- Jerry Coyne

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The argument from divine hiddenness: A noseeum argument at best?

1. Suppose that God exists—that is, suppose that
there is a perfectly powerful, perfectly wise
being who loves us like a perfect parent.
2. God is mostly hidden from people: Our evidence is inconclusive; religious experience of the interesting and unambiguous sort is rare.
3. There is no good reason for God to remain hidden.
4. If God is mostly hidden and there is no good reason for God to remain hidden, then one of
the following is true:
a. God exists but, like a negligent father, does not love us enough to make himself known.
b. God exists but, like an inept lover, lacks the wisdom to appreciate the importance or proper way of revealing himself to us.
c. God exists but is too weak to reveal himself in the ways that he should in order to secure his relational goals.
5. Premises (1)–(4) are inconsistent.
6. Therefore: God does not exist.

Can Steven Wykstra's critique of  noseeum arguments, which he develops in response to the problem of evil, be applied here? 

In the Midwest we have "noseeums" — tiny flies which, while having a painful bite, are so small you "no see 'um." We also have Rowe's inductive argument for atheism. Rowe holds that the theistic God would allow suffering only if doing so serves some outweighing good. But is there some such good for every instance of suffering? Rowe thinks not. There is much suffering, he says, for which we see no such goods; and this, he argues, inductively justifies believing that for some sufferings there are no such goods. Since it gives such bite to what we cannot see, I call this a "noseeum argument" from evil. ("Rowe's Noseeum Arguments from Evil", in The Evidential Argument from Evil, p. 126.)

In other words, if we can't see why God would not make himself more obvious, is that sufficient grounds for rejecting his existence? Should we expect to know the answer to this, if theism is true?

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Hush Hush

I believe in at least this part of "teach the controversy," and that is that supporters of evolution shouldn't suppress aspects of evolutionary biology that are problematic, for fear of (God forbid, oops that should be Darwin forbid), providing cannot fodder for creationists. 

As the article says: 

Ball suggests that popular accounts of evolution may be sanitized because of anxiety that the uncertainty might be exploited by people who want to undermine evolutionary theory. But, he writes, "We are grown-up enough to be told about the doubts, debates and discussions that are leaving the putative 'age of the genome' with more questions than answers."

But, if we can't talk about the problems with any theory, then the whole self-correcting mechanism of science is threatened. 

Just for fun, I am including a link to the Pistol Annies' song "Hush Hush." 

Hush hush don't you dare say a word
Hush hush don't you know the truth hurts
Hush hush when push comes to shove
It's best to keep it hush hush
Best to keep it hush hush

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Lovejoy on Behaviorism

This is a 1920s precursor to the argument from reason.

HT: Steve Hays.

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Motive arguments and Mutual Assured Destruction

My claim is that everyone's belief choices are partly the result of reflection, and partly the result of motives, of which none of us are fully aware. No one side in the discussion has a monopoly on rational or nonrational motives. So motive arguments are a wash, and if they are introduced in place of actual arguments, the result is mutual assured destruction, since each side can "bomb" the other with an equal measure of motive arguments, and blow up the discussion permanently.

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Motives and arguments

I've been acutely aware, since I was 18, of the wishful thinking charge against Christianity, when I read Bertrand Russell, and that is one of the main reasons I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. If there were reasons to reject Christianity, I wanted to know what those were, and I wanted to know that sooner rather than later. These considerations have made Christianity more difficult to believe, not easier to believe.

All discussion of the motives of other people is sheer speculation. If you become convinced, say, that atheism is true, it may help you explain why there are so many believers, but you have things backwards if you think you can start with speculation about peoples motives and conclude anything about what you have good reason to believe. Everyone can speculate about the motives of their opponents. It's as easy as pie, but it ends in a stalemate.

If you say, "I'd love to believe in a heaven, but I just can't because the evidence just isn't there." I'm not going to call you a liar. But if I tell you I thought about these issues, and I would believe if I didn't think there were good reasons for believing (and I've just given a couple of reasons off the top of my head), then no matter how poorly you think of them as reasons, you don't have a good reason to disbelieve my introspective report.

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Does the material add up to the mental?

Further, when people define matter, they do it by defining the mental out of it. If we start attributing mental properties to matter at the basic level of analysis, we don't call that materialism, we call it panpsychism. Yet, we couldn't do science without minds, so somehow these material states some how add up, put together, to a mental state. OK, but now, it looks to me as if, if you add up material states until doomsday, you never close the question of whether the mental state is there. The computer beats me in chess, but does it have the inner states of mind that go along with winning a chess game. Most of us would say no. So something can function as mental, it seems to me, without actually being mental.

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