Steven Carr

Robert Turkel, also known as JP Holding often criticises Internet Infidels writings and he has donw so again here :-

<a href="http://www.tektonics.org/gerkin01.html" target="_blank">http://www.tektonics.org/gerkin01.html</a>

and here
<a href="http://www.tektonics.org/tillstill7-5.html" target="_blank">http://www.tektonics.org/tillstill7-5.html</a>

In the first article, he writes :-
'The comparison to the earth being flat, etc. is not an appropriate analogy: the philosophical arguments for God's existence are intellectually accessible to everyone and at all times; data about the earth and the universe has not been.'


So Turkel thinks peasant people in ancient societies had the education to learn and discuss the Kalaam argument, and the Ontological Argument, and the Argument from Fine-Tuning etc etc and these philosophical arguments were 'intellectually accessible to everyone and at all times'.

This bit of stupidity is the result of his studying the results of 'decades of research in anthropology'?


And he has the sheer audacity to complain that the translators of the NIV engaged in 'projection of our attitudes on the rest of the world and history, ... being ethnocentric and anachronistic'!

Turkel writes about Till 'Bottom line: his claim that David was "feeling" or "felt" guilty is an anachronistic blunder that shows just how appallingly ignorant Till is of Biblical cultural backgrounds', and yet Turkel claims that the philosophical arguments for God's existence were 'intellectually accessible to everyone and at all times'.

Turkel chides Till for his 'anachronistic blunder' in saying that human beings can feel guilt, while Turkel claims peasant shepherds had intellectual access to Thomas's 'Summa Contra Gentiles'.

Actually, the data about the circumference of the Earth was available to the Greeks long , long ago,at least as long as the philosophical arguments for God's existence. (Perhaps Turkel thinks Thomas Aquinas lived before the ancient Greeks) But Turkel is not one to let facts get in the way of insulting sceptics.

I can't resist one piece of Robert (No Link) Turkel's writing from his essay I linked to 'I readily provide links when answers are provided elsewhere, but only where there are specific applications.'

So Robert (No Link) Turkel does not link to the essays he criticises, while boasting to his gullible readers how he readily provides links!

Turkel thinks he is a clever critic of the Internet Infidels, while his articles are simply insults, mixed up with stupidites, of which I have only given a tiny sample here.

Cretinist

Farris McTill? Does this moron actually think he is funny?

ManM

Steven Carr,
Just glancing over what you copied in your post, it seems to me that you missed something. When Turkel wrote that the arguments for God's existence are 'intellectually accessible to everyone and at all times', I think he means that they do not require advanced scientific observations.

Hobbs

Which seems to me to be reason enough to be very suspicious of the ability of these arguments to say anything reliable about the real, objective world out there.

Steven Carr

The Greeks worked out the circumference of the Earth with a stick stuck in the ground - hardly advanced scientific observations.

Turkel was responding to somebody pointing out that the numbers of believers in God was not a good argument for belief in God, as large numbers of people also believed in a flat Earth.

In which case, the fact that the arguments for God's existence are philosophical is quite irrelevant, unless Turkel is saying that these believers ('at all times' to use his words) had access to these philosophical arguments, which were developed largely by Thomas Aquinas. And that is nonsense.

Is Turkel really claiming that people 'everywhere and at all times' had the intellectual access to the philosophical arguments for God's existence, in a way diametrically opposed to the way these same people had no access to the evidence for the roundness of the Earth?

That is just stupidity.

[ October 17, 2002: Message edited by: Steven Carr ]</p>