Common Sense Atheism

Magnus Betner is a Swedish comedian who did the following atheist stand-up routine in a church. Ballsy. And hilarious:

Magnus also has his own Youtube channel, which has all his videos in English.

I’m puzzled by the world.
I cannot deem
The timepiece real,
Its maker but a dream

- Voltaire

The Design Argument is probably the most popular argument for the existence of God. Even a nonreligious person may look at the world, so complex and beautiful, and decide it must have been created by somebody very smart and powerful. Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson thought religions were absurd, but even they thought there must have been some kind of Creator.

But there are some problems with this argument.

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Dear readers,

In the comments on this blog, I very often reply to questions or challenges with something like this:

Thanks for your comment, ____. I would like to reply to your question/objection more fully than I have time for right now. I will write a few posts on this in the future. Stay tuned!

I thought I could keep all these promises in my head, but that was foolish. So now I’m keeping a list. But I’m sure I’m forgetting many topics I was supposed to write about, so I need your help.

If I’ve left you a comment like the above one, please comment again with a reminder, and I will add it to my list so I can be sure to respond as promised.

In my first comment to this post, I will provide my list so far.

Thanks!

The first video from RDF-TV (Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science TV).

Here is a long list of atheism audio talks and lectures, provided as a counterpart to pages like the Ultimate Apologetics MP3 Audio Page. Obviously, I do not endorse all the views given here.

I love to fill my head with knowledge and perspective whenever I am driving, walking, biking, etc. I like to make the best use of my time. This is the kind of stuff I usually listen to, though I do occasionally pass the time with Adams’ Harmonielehre or Glass’ Violin Concerto.

Of course, all this audio will play on any media player. I just use the term “iPod” as shorthand for “portable media player.” My personal favorite is the Sandisk Sansa e200. See Why I Love My Sandisk Sansa e200.

Please comment with your own links, suggestions, and favorites. New links will be added to the bottom of each section’s list.

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I’m blogging my way through Sense and Goodness Without God, Richard Carrier’s handy worldview-in-a-box for atheists. (See the post index for all sections.) Last time, I discussed one of my favorite sections, The Nature and Origin of the Universe. Today I discuss section III.3.4 The Multiverse as Ultimate Being.

Theists and atheists agree there must be some ultimate explanation, some end to the infinite regress. But they disagree over which properties this “ultimate being” must have:

Theists think it has a whole plethora of amazing powers and attributes, including the most complex mind imaginable. But as atheists point out, there is no evidence for any of those tacked-on assumptions… There are only two properties that we can be sure the ultimate being has: its nature is to exist, and it had a reasonable chance of producing our universe exactly as we see it. We can’t say anything more than that without sufficient evidence. And there is no actual evidence for any of the traditional divine attributes.

Carrier does a great job explaining why naturalists think it’s more likely the “multiverse” is a more likely Ultimate Being than “god”:

The multiverse explains everything that exists, and so even from the start it is just as good as “God did it.” It is even better than that, since the multiverse fits and follows from known scientific facts, and it makes the exact features of the universe highly probable – whereas there is no reason to believe this is the universe god would probably make, nor is there any evidence that a god actually did any of the making… Both solutions leave the same questions unanswered. [Why is there something instead of nothing. How come the Ultimate Being doesn't need a cause?] But we find the god hypothesis leaves far too many more questions unanswered. So we take the multiverse instead, as our ultimate “brute fact.”

But now, what about those Big Questions? Did the multiverse have a beginning? How did it get started, if nothing came before it?

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The modern Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) for God’s existence involves literally hundreds of supporting arguments, counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments from a wide range of disciplines – philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of time, philosophical theology, metaphysics, physical cosmology and cosmogony, and more.

Because of this, I doubt that anyone has a firm grasp of all the possibilities and implications of the KCA. In 2007, Mark Nowacki published The Kalam Cosmological Argument for God,  a short book that tried to gather together and summarize a few of these arguments. He wrote:

The body of literature relating to the KCA has grown to a significant bulk, and there is now a real danger of fragmentation, duplication, and misassessment because of the plurality of interpretations that the argument has received. One major aim of this book is to perform the scholarly service of laying bare the logical structure of the KCA… which, it is hoped, will make the work useful to future researchers… [And] another service performed by this book is to provide a report on the “state of the question” in contemporary analytic philosophy and thereby furnish a convenient guide to the significant literature on the KCA.

My goals with this (very long) post series on the KCA are similar. But I have the advantage of unlimited space. Given enough time, I can summarize and clarify every argument relevant to the KCA. I can add new updates as new arguments are published. I can take time to explain complex articles in plain talk, so that the educated layman can keep up if she so desires.

What is perhaps even more beneficial is that I can draw a massive, pannable, zoomable graphic map of all these arguments. My hope is that this will make it clear which threads of argument lead to dead ends, which threads require more research, which threads provide strong support for the KCA, and which threads greatly weaken the KCA. The map will also visualize the argument, which should clarify its structure in general.

No such gigantic argument map could fit on the pages of academic journals and books, which is perhaps why philosophers have mostly neglected to use argument maps despite their power to clarify and illuminate complex philosophical debates. But this is the 21st century. We can do better. We need not be bound by Gutenberg’s limitations.

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There are moments in The Office when something I know Steve Carell’s character is about to say or do something so cringingly stupid and awkward that I literally have to pause the video (I only watch TV online) to prepare myself. I shield my eyes and clench my body up and then when he finishes his terrifyingly ignorant act I have to recover with a long groan: “Ohhhhhhhh Goooooooodddddd Nooooooooo…”

I have to do some of the same things to survive the onslaught of stupidity that is Dinesh D’Souza.

I try to avoid writing about Dinesh D’Souza because his existence makes me despair for the human race. But writing a rant against Dinesh is just so damn easy, and all this philosophical writing I’ve been doing makes me tired. So let me shoot an apple in a barrel today.

One of the most vomit-inducing passages of D’Souza’s What’s So Great About Christianity is this:

In sum, the death of Christianity must also mean the gradual extinction of values such as human dignity, the right against torture, and the rights of equal treatment asserted by women, minorities, and the poor. Do we want to give these up also? If we cherish the distinctive ideals of Western civilization, and believe as I do that they have enormously benefited our civilization and our world, then whatever our religious convictions, and even if we have none, we will not rashly try to hack at the religious roots from which they spring.

Dinesh thinks that only Western Christian culture has values of human dignity, a right against torture, and equal rights for women, minorities, and the poor. In one debate, Dinesh also said that Jesus invented the concept of compassion. Woah.

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Dear believers,

I grew up a devout Christian. I prayed daily. I studied the Bible. I sang the praises of Jesus. I sacrificed my own plans to serve God, and tried my best to follow his commands. I loved God and felt his presence in my life. God answered some of my prayers. He healed a few people I knew – in ways medical science could not explain. He lifted me out of a late-teenage depression and gave me compassion for those starving around the world. I made trips to China and England to help build schools and share the good news of Jesus.

There were some things about my Christian faith that confused me, but I trusted that I would understand when I got to heaven – or perhaps I would never understand, because God is so far beyond human reason.

I didn’t understand why he would allow the Bible to say so many contradictory, awful, or silly things. Did my loving God really command that rape victims must marry their rapists? What kind of “cultural context” could make that a loving thing to command? Did he really demand that we not wear clothes made of two different kinds of cloths? All the pastors I knew chose which verses still ‘counted’ and which ones didn’t, but the only criteria they ever used for doing so was what God told them. The weird thing was that God told each pastor a different thing than the next. But why put the bad or silly verses in there in the first place? And why would God allow so much confusion? If he was all-powerful, surely he could communicate to his pastors more clearly.

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Welcome to my course on ethics. Last time, we looked at the radical ethics of Martin Luther. Today, we look at another radical ethical thinker: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527).

For Machiavelli, the highest purpose of social political life is to attain and hold power. Moral rules, then, are practical rules about how to gain and hold power over others. Thus, you should break a contract whenever it benefits you, because otherwise the other person (who by human nature is wicked), will break his contract with you. You should keep your contracts only when they help you gain and hold power over others.

Machiavelli is the first major thinker to judge actions solely in terms of their consequences. An action is good not because God commands it, nor because it comes from virtue, but because its consequences are the attainment and keeping of power. Most of The Prince is dedicated to explaining how we can measure consequences, and what princes can do to attain and hold their power.

Luther and Calvin had separated the ethics of church and state. Machiavelli had made power the ultimate concern, and set ethics against the background of unchanging human depravity. And all three of them had made the individual the ultimate focus of moral significance. The stage was set for our next great moral thinker, Thomas Hobbes.