No one should have to get a doctorate in philosophy to be able to have a reasonable degree of certainty (like we have that say, our family and friends exist) to know God exists. That’s an evidential argument from evil right there. The more advanced theistic philosophy often solves one populace issue at the expense of creating an even more idiotic position (from someone with exposure to more education who ought to know better). So when I hear your guest speak of the need to engage more advanced theistic philosophy I can’t help but think, “Because there’s even better comedic value they are missing out on?”

Ultimately I recognize the public square needs to be about respect of individuals where they actually are and not about the honor status shitty ideas they may be peddling deserve. We are dealing with people first, and ideas second. We can’t expect people to magically realize why they are wrong without taking the time to explain it to them (assuming we are actually correct, of course).

So, I think there should be another level of advanced criticism, but it is really hard to fault the shallow end of the pool for being shallow. The more sophisticated theology is just as epistemically unfair to the human condition as the pop-nonsense Dawkins takes shots at.

Ben

It’s a hierarchy and priority thing. If you have trust as your foundation, you have peace even when you are unsure what choices to make. You don’t depend entirely or primarily on your ability, but on God’s, which includes his ability to leverage mistakes into good things.

If you switch them around, or primarily emphasize your own responsibility, you don’t really work any harder, but you do carry the stress of having to perform.

What I got out of this book, as well as my own study and life is

1. Both free will and predestination exist in reality.

What this means is that

- We are held responsible for our actions (free will)
- We are dependent on God for repentance and faith (predestination)

2. In what ratio do we emphasize each?

The metaphor that Boettner uses has stuck with me, and I like it – to the extent that we can compare God’s power to man’s is the extent to which we should emphasize God’s role in our salvation to our own.

What this means practically is that we are essentially Calvinistic, emphasizing man’s need for God to give him saving faith, and our continued need to focus on God’s ability to keep and groom us, rather than our own.

When we do emphasize our responsibility, we emphasize (a) our need to focus on God rather than our own ability, and (b) our responsibility to exercise spiritual disciplines with a view that they are “means of grace” – that we don’t actually create spiritual maturity or build ourselves into spiritual giants, but rather, the disciplines gain us access to God who then forms us.

It’s like getting into a food line. We don’t feed ourselves or create the food, but we certainly avail ourselves of the opportunity to get it.

NOTES ON YOUR GUEST

3. While this is a paradox, these are not incompatible

I disagree with your guest and agree with Lichen(?), who defaults to compatibility. Your guest’s agrreement with Freedom and Foreknowledge, but not with Freedom and Determinism is perhaps reasonable, but as you pointed out, gets squishy when you try to define how foreknowledge works.

4. Causal Determinism

I think that pure materialists are driven to this point of view by logic, though reality, and the desire to believe that people are responsible and free, probably drives them to disagree with Causal Determinism. I think this is just one of the ways in which the logical conclusions of atheism/materialism disagree with reality, which is a good reason to reject it.

5. Cosmological Argument and Dennett

I hate the ‘what caused God’ response – there is no infinite regress – eventually, you must have an uncaused cause, and that’s God. I don’t understand Dennett’s objection to that.

6. Uncharitable Theisms

I and many others agree with Pat Robertson in principle, and those who think he should shut his mouth are being inconsistent with scripture, and I agree with Dawkins on that.

However, I am not just being unashamed of some unethical view, but rather, believe in a nuanced view that explains this well.

For example, are the Hatians partly to blame for their predicament? Absolutlely – like the person who plays in traffic and then blames others when they get hit, or like New Orleans residents who live below sea level and wonder that floods come, much of the destruction in Haiti is due to ignorance, corruption, and living in a dangerous area.

Pat Robertson’s view can be viewed as a spiritualized view of the Haitian’s fault for living without a Christian world view (practical consequences of corruption and lack of planning), as well as living in defiance of God (spiritual retribution) and in agreement with paganism/voodoo.

Retribution via natural disasters is certainly a common theme in scripture. The problem with many people’s simplistic view of this is that not EVERY storm is retribution.

But perhaps we OUGHT to think of many large scale disasters in terms of judgment and repentance. Many of the great revivals in history have been preceded by such disasters.

Now, perhaps a materialist might blanch at seeing repentance as a solution for, say, the black plague, when really, sanitation and medicine would solve it. I understand that, and partially agree with that perspective.

But Christians who verbalize disgust with the likes of Falwell and Robertson are, as Dawkins has remarked, being hypocritical and logically inconsistent with the biblical view of God they say they believe. And secularists who mock them are usually mocking some simplistic straw man of what they are trying to communicate.

As mentioned above, Dawkins does not believe that religion is the root of all evil. He says so, in the first page of the preface to the God Delusion – he eventually got a compromise with the insertion of a question mark after the title:

“From the start, I didn’t like the title and fought it hard. Religion is not the route of all all evil, for no one thing is the route of all anything.” (Preface, The God Delusion)

Furthermore, Dennett says why he avoided going into a long discussion of the existence of God. I think you touched on it when you mentioned how Dennett is primarily interested in inquiry. But in full:

“Philosophers have spent two millenia concocting and criticizing arguments for the existence of God, such as the Argument from Design and the Ontological Argument, and the arguments against the existence of God, and many brights continue to pursue these issues, hacking away vigorously at the arguments of believers as if they were trying to refute a rival scientific theory. But not I. I decided some time ago that diminishing returns had set in on the arguments about God’s existence, and I doubt many breakthroughs are in the offing, from either side. Besides, many deeply religious people insist that all those arguments – on both sides – simply miss the point of religion, and their demonstrated lack of interest in the arguments persuades me of their sincerity. Fine. What then is the point of religion?” (p. 27, Breaking The Spell)

Dennett is doing exactly what you – and your interviewee – have allowed other philosophers to do – set off from a premiss without going into great detail defending it. The premiss here is that spending too long going into the existence of God is not worthwhile. And there is surely a lot to be said for that – how on Earth would Dennett’s projected inquiries get on if we had to determine the existence or not of God before getting on with it? It’s a case that has strong parallels with only needing a broad account of moral responsibility before looking into how free will might fit with that.

Maybe you could include this as part of your ‘Ask The Atheist’:

I think it’s probably fair to say that most people are not interested in, and would simply stop reading if given, academic philosophy. This includes natural theology. The New Atheists are often criticized for not engaging with the ‘best in the field’. But the ‘best in the field’ often requires at least undergraduate level philosophy training. Often, it requires still more, with wider knowledge of cosmology or physics &c. required to understand an argument. Given this barrier, how far would you have liked to see the New Atheists engage with contemporary natural theology? I would also be interested in how far you would ask popular accounts of Christianity or other religions to engage with Oppy, Sobel, Martin and so on.

—–

It’s a tough question, but in my opinion, I get the impression you want to set the bar too high, and thus, your criticism of the New Atheists in this blog and interviews tend to strike me as harsh. Sure, there are much better works of atheistic philosophy of religion. But they’re for people like you, who are able to do challenging philosophy, who like this sort of thing, and who want to spend a great deal of time with it. Most people, perhaps even most philosophers who are not themselves philosophers of religion, will not be willing or able to do it.

I should say, crucially, that I don’t think this means that reading and writing academic philosophy of religion is pointless, merely that some understanding should be extended to people who want to draw an opinion about these issues, without going into such very great depth as Oppy or Sobel. It also provides some justification, if not formal then at least pragmatic, for not tackling the ultra-sophisticated positions of the lifetime’s work of exceptionally clever people like Swinburne, in a popular work.

That said, how much do we need to bribe Craig or Plantinga to be on your show? :-)