Jan Haugland

I noticed on the "old board" I was not the only one, ahem, annoyed by the "xmas challenge to atheists" in Slate magazine.

To get rid of some steam, I wrote a reply to it in my blog. Got a few comments from my regulars, too, as can be expected.

Of course, no replies to the "challenge" is going to get any headlines in major media.

Synaesthesia

From the article:
"Quantum theory dematerialized reality, making the cosmos seem more like a thought than like a machine. But whose thought?"

*wince*

"The discovery that the universe began with a creationlike Big Bang around 13 billion years ago, for example, breathed new life into the so-called cosmological argument, which posits God as the first cause of nature. "

*writhe*

Mr Hold believes also that:
"There are only two arguments for the nonexistence of God with any intellectual merit."

Do you know which ones he cites? Not the argument from known delusion. No, we don't want to remind people that faith leads the vast majority of the faithful into delusion.

Not the argument from parsiomony - which is, as it happens, the most basic atheistic argument, and the source of so much philosophical firepower that Jim Holt's half baked arguments would be burnt to a crisp were they exposed to it.

No, he cites the argument from incoherence and the argument from evil. Yet even in these cases he misses what is so very devastating about them: they expose the vacuity of the God concept. How god's veneer plausibilty and substance is an illusion created by it's infinite maleability.


Of course I don't expect him to produce a very good idea of what atheist's arguments are. (Only the most exceptionally rare gem of a theist is capable of that insight and honesty.) What I find upsetting is that he portrays his hamstrung version of two relatively minor arguments as the whole of intellectually respectable atheist arguments.

eh

It seems to be yet another theist misunderstanding a scientific area, such as QM, and concluding that we have proof for the existence of a deity. Perhaps if the author of the article was asked to back up their claims about QM and the BBT, we might get somewhere.

The Sound of Dogs Barking

God is so evil!

Jan Haugland

Heh. When I first read the article, I assumed he meant benevolent not malevolent. Weird sense of humour, or perhaps he is very pessimistic.

capnkirk