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Legalized Plunder PDF Print E-mail
Culture and Politics - Obama Nation Building
Written by Douglas Wilson   
Sunday, April 18, 2010 4:02 pm

Here it is, in a nutshell. The state is either under authority or it is not. If the state is not under authority, it has no authority -- only power. That means that prudence might dictate doing what they say, but conscience never could. So the only way conscience can direct the citizenry to obey the state's authority is if the state itself is under authority. No created entity has authority unless that created entity is under authority. But if the state is under authority, this means the state is under limits.

Being under limited authority means that it is possible to know the nature and extent of those limits. If they go past those limits, everybody knows about it.

If there is no God above the state, the state has no authority. If there is a God above the state, then the state has no authority outside the limits that have been set for it. And in either case, there is no reason grounded in conscience for putting up with legalized plunder.


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Jabe  Sunday, April 18, 2010 6:29 pm
I believe this is called the fallacy of the false alternative. You have offered a polar opposite either/or and completely ignored all the other possibilities.

If there's no God, then maybe the state gets its authority from the consent of the governed -- that seemed to be the opinion of the authors of our founding documents. If there is a God, maybe the limits of state authority don't interest him and he's happy for us to work it out (or not work it out) ourselves. Maybe the state's authority comes from the biological fact that humans need to live together in community. And I'm not asserting any of those possibilities; merely pointing out that the two you've offered hardly exhaust the field.
Douglas Wilson  Sunday, April 18, 2010 7:14 pm
Jabe,

Not exactly. If there is no authority over the state, then "the consent of the governed" is a noble sounding phrase, but it signifies nothing, really. There is no reason why 49 bits of protoplasm have respect the "authority" of the fifty bits of protoplasm that outvoted them on whatever it was.

And if there is an authoritative God over the state, then this authority means it has been wielded. He has told the state what to do, as in, He wrote a book. In this case the book is called Deuteronomy.
Annwas Adeniawc  Sunday, April 18, 2010 7:17 pm
Jabe this is not a false dilemma fallacy: either the state is under authority or it is not. In your example the god becomes the demos instead of the Almighty.
Gianni  Sunday, April 18, 2010 10:58 pm

In other words, Jabe, your post is an example of the fallacy of denying the correlative: an attempt at introducing alternatives where there are none.
gullchasedship  Sunday, April 18, 2010 11:18 pm
Sorry, I'm a little confused by this post. Is it about whether the state acknowledges that it is under authority?

Whose authority did the Romans think they were under when Paul said they had been given authority by God and should be obeyed?
Jabe  Monday, April 19, 2010 4:27 am
Doug, the reason the 49 bits of protoplasm will respect the authority of the other 50 is that most of them understand the practical consequences of living under anarchy, and that anarchy is worse than occasionally being outvoted. As for the few that don't, the majority that does respect such practicalities will act in collective self defense to bring them into line.

As for the second paragraph of your reply, you're assuming that your particular Deuteronomy hermeneutic is the only possible one. Not only is it not the only possible one, I suspect that for all of church history taken as a whole it's a minority one if not a fringe one.

Gianni, I know from past experience that you're very good at sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la la la, I can't hear you," but the fact that you refuse to see alternatives that conflict with your worldview doesn't mean they aren't there.

Annwas, whether the practical effect of a particular alternative is to elevate the demos to the status of deity is irrelavant to the question of whether that alternative (or others) exists.

Look, here's the bottom line: It is a biological imperative for humans to live together in community; there are reasons most of us don't become hermits. And in order to live together in community, certain behaviors have to be suppressed (by force, if necessary) and certain others have to be encouraged (also by force, if necessary). And whether you believe that biological imperative is the work of a creator or the work of millions of years of evolution doesn't change the bottom line that that imperative exists, and is sufficient reason all by itself for governments to exist.

We can argue about the proper limits of government, but take God out of it altogether and there are still plenty of good reasons for having government, which necessarily implies government authority. You're all making this far more complicated than it is.
TBush  - Imperial Imperative  Monday, April 19, 2010 5:35 am
Actually, you're giving protoplasm an awful lot of credit here- usually, the outvoted protoplasm acquiesce for the simple reason that 'might makes right', or they wait patiently until a revolution of the protoplasm seems appropriate. Jabe, your argument sounds like a sound byte radio commercial for the 'tyranny of the majority'- "get in line or we'll 'help' you get into line- don't you know that the alternative is unpleasant?"
Jabe  Monday, April 19, 2010 5:55 am
TBush, granting that the alternative is unpleasant, how is that different than telling a petulant teenager (which some people on this list increasingly sound like every time Obama's name comes up) that there are many reasons to obey one's parents, and one of them is that the alternative is unpleasant?

There are many reasons to obey the law against murder, and a mature, rational, reasonable individual obeys it because it's the right thing to do. However, if "the right thing to do" isn't a good enough reason for you, then perhaps you'll obey it because the consequence of not obeying it is either to be locked in a jail cell for the rest of your life or given a lethal injection. And I wish -- I really do -- that that reason weren't necessary and people simply obeyed the law against murder because it's the right thing to do. Unfortunately, some people won't.
Michael Duenes  - No God = No authority  Monday, April 19, 2010 7:22 am
To even talk about "authority" without there being a God is nonsense. Given atheism, not only is there no such thing as authority, there is no such thing as rationality. Authority does not have ontological status apart from God, so let's dispense with that option right now. Given atheism, there is no such thing as government or language. As we say over and over and over: It's all just matter in motion, baby!
Jabe  Monday, April 19, 2010 7:57 am
Michael, here's the answer you would get from an atheist: "If I were to say, 'Authority does not have ontological status apart from my pet goat Fred; without Fred, there is no language, no authority, it's all just matter in motion,' you would immediately see how ridiculous an argument that is. Why is it a better argument when you substitute "God" for "Fred"?
Derrick  Monday, April 19, 2010 9:45 am
Jabe,

Your ideas about what is possible in a godless universe have already been addressed here:

http://www.dougwils.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7512:if-the-pope-were-an-atheist&catid=84:sex-and-culture


As far as this goes:

"Look, here's the bottom line: It is a biological imperative for humans to live together in community; there are reasons most of us don't become hermits."

Your bottom line begs the question. Twice. First, why should anything in the pointless and decaying universe care about humans or their biology? Second, since you've presupposed pragmatism here and indeed, throughout your comments, you'll need to prove the truth of pragmatism before your claims can have any traction.

Finally, some of what you claim is is actually counterproductive for you. For example, you said that the Pastor had a false dichotomy. And what was one of your alternatives?

"Doug, the reason the 49 bits of protoplasm will respect the authority of the other 50 is that most of them understand the practical consequences of living under anarchy, and that anarchy is worse than occasionally being outvoted. As for the few that don't, the majority that does respect such practicalities will act in collective self defense to bring them into line."

But this just goes to the Pastor's point that the alternative is power. The weaker lions/ants/rams don't "respect" the "authority" of the the stronger lions/ants/rams. They fear their power. And for the ones who don't fear, they get their butts kicked. This is all about pragmatism, survival, fear, and power. There is no "authority" here. Might makes right. Perhaps you should think more about what 'authority' actually is. Start with Rom. 13:1. (Hint: authority is an inherently ethical concept and it therefore is not proven to exist simply because entity A acquiesces to entity B's demand.)

And just to highlight this again, simply showing what is the case will never get you to a proof of what ought to be the case. 'Is' does not imply 'ought.' The two concepts are in different categories. You have confused this point with regularity.
Jabe  Monday, April 19, 2010 11:03 am
Derrick, not every "is" has a corresponding "ought" (though you're right that the two are separate questions). Sometimes "that's the way it is because that's the way it is" is as much of an "ought" as you're going to get. And the twin facts that humans live in community, and that living in community requires abiding by some rules, are the way it is.

Maybe nothing in the universe does care about humans and their biology, in which case we really do need to work out our own salvation. As far as proving pragmatism, that really comes down to a question of whether humans are better off governed than they are ungoverned. I think there's a mountain of evidence that points to the answer as being yes (and I suspect you do as well), but if you want to make an argument that humans would be better off living in anarchy, I'd love to hear it.

And the might makes right argument is a two-edged sword you might want to think twice about wielding. It applies with equal force to the question of why people should obey God. Because he'll send you to hell if you don't, right? In other words, might makes right.

Are you suggesting that in a godless universe otherwise identical to this one, that humans would be incapable of talking to each other, analyzing their circumstances, and making decisions about how to organize a society in such a way as to provide maximum benefit and minimum pain to the greatest number? Because if I'm understanding you (and others here) correctly, your argument isn't merely that humans wouldn't, but that they couldn't. And if that is indeed your position, I'd be most interested in seeing some evidence for it.
Gianni  Monday, April 19, 2010 3:46 pm

"Gianni, I know from past experience that you're very good at sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "la la la, I can't hear you,""

Wow, thanks, you make it sound complicated, but trust me, it's not that difficult. And nice to meet you, too.

"but the fact that you refuse to see alternatives that conflict with your worldview doesn't mean they aren't there."

Well, I was only summarizing what other people were telling you, why are you mad at me? But why does the fact that you see alternatives that are in harmony with your worldview mean that they are there? Or does that game work only one way? Can I beg the question too?

Assuming you are a Christian, you are an interesting example of a Christian who reasons like an atheist. Assuming you draw the line somewhere, where do you draw it, and why?

Also, suppose you walk into a bar and meet an ethical obligation and a reason. Would you be able to tell which is which? Or let me make it easier, suppose you meet an obligation and a carrot.
Jabe  Monday, April 19, 2010 4:55 pm
Gianni, your comment about the carrot is what I was talking about -- I've been reading your stuff here for months and your idea of argument is lobbing insults and personal invective. So don't be too shocked if occasionally what goes around comes around.

As for alternatives in harmony with my world view, I'm not sure I've given my world view. I'm simply explaining why Doug is mistaken that there are only two alternatives.

As to me seeing alternatives that aren't there, this is an example of you sticking your fingers in your ears. You may not like the alternatives I've offered; you may think they don't hold up to scrutiny; you may disagree with their premises; and there are plenty of people who feel the same about your world view too. But you can't honestly say I haven't provided viable alternatives to the two Doug offered.

And to say that if it ain't Christmas it must be the Fourth of July, as Doug did, is simply wrong. Maybe it is the Fourth of July, but maybe it's one of the other 363 days too.

So here's where I draw the line: You and Doug have painted yourselves into a theological corner because you've adopted premises that necessarily lead to preposterous conclusions. It's not just atheists who disagree with you; it's probably 95% of Christendom, both current and historical. I will grant that your conclusions necessarily flow from your premises; my disagreement isn't with your ability to go from A to B to C to D. Rather, it's the particular A you started from in the first place. And if your premises lead you to untenable conclusions -- such as "if there is no God above the state, then the state has no authority" -- then maybe you should re-examine your premises.
Daniel Franzen  Monday, April 19, 2010 5:25 pm
Jabe,

Could you enlighten us please on how NOT starting with God as the authority is a biblical notion. And if God is not the authority in establishing political power--what is? Man? How is that not idolatry? I have read your posts and you seem to posit some alternative starting point in explaining reality. You really are reasoning like an (professed) atheist, friend. Am I missing something? :confused:
Jabe  Monday, April 19, 2010 5:54 pm
Daniel, not starting with God as authority probably isn't a biblical notion, but that's not the question we were discussing. We were discussing whether as a matter of logic it is possible for the state to have authority apart from God. (That, at least, was where Doug started; we have done some meandering in the meantime.) And purely as a matter of logic, the answer is yes; there are numerous internally consistent worldviews that don't require God as the basis of government authority.

Now, if you want to say that your particular biblical worldview does require God, I won't argue with you. My dispute is over whether that's the only world view that is logically consistent.
Xon Hostetter  Monday, April 19, 2010 6:55 pm
So, in other words, Jabe, you want to debate the validity of the Christian worldview in this thread, and if we don't then Wilson's original post is unreasonable?

If you've been reading these comment threads for months as you say, then you know that most of us, like representatives of any other worldview, are coming at things from a certain perspective. We do not reinvent the wheel every time we have a discussion, and we do not see the need to reprove everything fundamental to our worldview before we apply it to a particular topic.

But then in swoops the person of undescribed worldview, who just wants to show us that our worldview isn't the only one out there. Why do you think we don't know this, exactly? Because Doug Wilson just posted something assuming his worldview is correct? Something does not compute here.

We are Christians, Jabe. We believe that all proper authority comes from God. We also believe we can make good arguments for that perspective, and have done so in other places (Wilson certainly has in debates with atheists). But here Wilson is making a point about why he belives that it is legitimate for Christians to resist certain bad laws. This is part of a long thread of posts and comments on this topic over the last several weeks. This discussions have been between Christians up to this point. So what is the point of your coming in here to "remind" us that non-Christians have a different view of authority?
Gianni  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 4:07 am

"Gianni, your comment about the carrot is what I was talking about -- I've been reading your stuff here for months and your idea of argument is lobbing insults and personal invective."

What's wrong with lobbing insults and personal invective?

"you've adopted premises that necessarily lead to preposterous conclusions. It's not just atheists who disagree with you; it's probably 95% of Christendom, both current and historical. I will grant that your conclusions necessarily flow from your premises; my disagreement isn't with your ability to go from A to B to C to D. Rather, it's the particular A you started from in the first place. . . . not starting with God as authority probably isn't a biblical notion. . . . there are numerous internally consistent worldviews that don't require God as the basis of government authority. Now, if you want to say that your particular biblical worldview does require God, I won't argue with you. My dispute is over whether that's the only world view that is logically consistent. . . . And if your premises lead you to untenable conclusions -- such as "if there is no God above the state, then the state has no authority" -- then maybe you should re-examine your premises."

Interesting. So you are saying that 95% of Christendom either refuses to believe a biblical notion, or has failed to think through the implications of a biblical notion. And that's why we should give up the biblical notion altogether, since we have also forgotten that a large section of mankind believes in other gods. For instead of joining the faithful and consistent 5%, you attack it because their conclusions make you laugh. Like Sarah, you laugh at all the wrong things.

"maybe you should re-examine your premises"

La la la.
Jabe  - re:  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 4:13 am
Xon Hostetter wrote:


We are Christians, Jabe. We believe that all proper authority comes from God. We also believe we can make good arguments for that perspective, and have done so in other places (Wilson certainly has in debates with atheists). But here Wilson is making a point about why he belives that it is legitimate for Christians to resist certain bad laws. This is part of a long thread of posts and comments on this topic over the last several weeks. This discussions have been between Christians up to this point. So what is the point of your coming in here to "remind" us that non-Christians have a different view of authority?


And that, Xon, is the best nutshell of my disagreement with your fundamental premise that I've seen: That your viewpoint is the only "Christian" viewpoint. It isn't merely that there are other worldviews out there, but there are other Christian worldviews out there too.

Not all Christians believe in sola scriptura, and they don't cease being Christians because they have a different view of the role of Scripture. Not all Christians are Calvinists, or believe that the law of Moses is a blueprint for civil government. Not all Christians reject science, or an expanded civil government. Some Christians even believe that Jesus was a socialist. And their worldviews are just as Christian as yours. The list of things you have to believe in order to be a Christian is a lot smaller than you seem to think.

It reminds me of the old joke about St. Peter giving a tour of heaven and telling the tourists they needed to be very, very quiet as they walked past a certain building "because on the inside are the Baptists, and they think they're the only ones here."

So when Doug comes along to tell us that there are only two possible alternatives, most of the time he's doubly wrong. There aren't only two alternatives under everyone's worldview, and there aren't only two alternatives even if we restrict our survey to Christian worldviews.
Xon Hostetter  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 7:43 pm
Jabe,

You yourself acknowledged earlier that the notion that there is any authority not derived from God is "probably not" compatible with Christian thought. That was the only point I was referring to. You fancy yourself an expert in exposing false choices. Well then, reject the false choice you are putting forward. Nobody here has advocated "Calvinism" as the only Christian worldview, or "blueprint" theonomy as the only Christian worldview, or even sola scriptura as the only Christian worldview. Where is that coming from? What fascinating earlier encounters explain the hobby horse you have rode in on here?

But Christians do believe, as you yourself acknowledged with a "probably," that all legitimate authority is derived from God. I am not aware of any broadly orthodox Christian school of thought that holds that civil government, for example, is simply outside of God's jurisdiction entirely.

Your original "gotcha" was about the answers that atheists might give. Nothing about all the "God doesn't have authority over civil authorities' Christians that you acknowledge probably don't exist. When Wilson responded to you, you then said nothing ore than that his "Deuteronomy hermeneutic" is a "fringe" position in the church. But you gave no specifics. What particularly is a "fringe" position? That the Bible, including Deuteronoy, has applicability to daily life including political matters? That's hardly "fringe" historically, though certain details of how it all works out with wisdom is not settled. But that's already too far afield of the original point being discussed. What, exactly, is "fringe" about Wilson's claim? You didn't say. But Wilson's main point was, again, simply that all authority is ultimately derived from God and must answer to him. Are you honestly calling that a highly controversial position within Christianity? No, you're not. But then I'm back to wondering: what is your purpose here, exactly? To warn us against rejecting alternatives that we didn't reject? Or to remind us of hypothetical positions that even you don't really think exist?

Your barrels were originally pointed at the legitimacy of atheist answers to these questions. But that, as I already pointed out, was a rather pointless exercise. We don't have to re-invent the wheel and refute atheists every time we talk about God. Then you tried to make it about all these alternative positions within Christianity, but you never specified what they even are and I don't think your heart is in trying to do so. So, again, what gives?
Derrick  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 4:40 am
"Derrick, not every "is" has a corresponding "ought" (though you're right that the two are separate questions). Sometimes "that's the way it is because that's the way it is" is as much of an "ought" as you're going to get. And the twin facts that humans live in community, and that living in community requires abiding by some rules, are the way it is."

And this, of course, is no "ought" at all. At best, all we've done is describe some particulars and then generalize.


"Maybe nothing in the universe does care about humans and their biology, in which case we really do need to work out our own salvation."

Not really. Remember the context here: we're talking about a world atheos. In that case, my description in the previously provided link holds (actually, it's worse than that but I'm simplifying for now) and "salvation" is a meaningless concept. We are carbon-based sacks of electro-chemical matter fighting each other and other species for limited resources. Those best adapted to their environment will survive and reproduce, and along the way they will enslave and/or eat the weaker individuals/species. There is no sin or salvation here. There is only survival and reproduction of the best adapted. And thus, to tie this back to the argument at hand, the concept of "authority" holds no meaning here. There is only power: the strong (i.e., best adapted) bits of protoplasm have and use it. There rest become fodder for the changing of the gene pool.


"As far as proving pragmatism, that really comes down to a question of whether humans are better off governed than they are ungoverned. I think there's a mountain of evidence that points to the answer as being yes (and I suspect you do as well), but if you want to make an argument that humans would be better off living in anarchy, I'd love to hear it."

I think you misunderstand my challenge, and by talking about evidence to support one thing being "better off", you're still begging the very question at issue. I'm not claiming that any particular outcome is "better" than another outcome, I'm challenging the very use of that kind of pragmatic calculus when it comes to questions of ethics. Once again, remember the context. Doug is talking about authority, not trespassing against prescribed boundaries, plunder, etc. He's talking about ethics. He responded to you by saying that in a world without God, such religious concepts don't exist. The world is one big will-to-power. You then brought in a series of observations based on "practical consequences." My point in challenging pragmatism is that it is a terrible theory of ethics. Like other forms of consequentialist ethics, it suffers numerous, fatal flaws. Obviously, as a Christian I believe that our societies ought to be governed. But that "ought" in the last sentence does not come as a conclusion to collecting a bunch of physical observations and then weighing then by means of some kind of pragmatic or utilitarian calculus. Such an effort would not only be unbiblical, it would be philosophically lousy.


"And the might makes right argument is a two-edged sword you might want to think twice about wielding. It applies with equal force to the question of why people should obey God. Because he'll send you to hell if you don't, right? In other words, might makes right."

Your attempted substitution breaks down hard. Your answer to this question is no more accurate than if I were to ask you why a child should obey his father and you responded: "Because the father will beat the child to death if he doesn't obey." Such an answer would be so thin as to actually miss the point. But the answer you provided is actually worse because it doesn't even make sense with basic Christian doctrine. We are already born under condemnation. It would hardly help to tell someone not to play with matches when he is already engulfed in flames.


"Are you suggesting that in a godless universe otherwise identical to this one, that humans would be incapable of talking to each other, analyzing their circumstances, and making decisions about how to organize a society in such a way as to provide maximum benefit and minimum pain to the greatest number? Because if I'm understanding you (and others here) correctly, your argument isn't merely that humans wouldn't, but that they couldn't. And if that is indeed your position, I'd be most interested in seeing some evidence for it."

It's actually much worse than that, for there would be nothing identical to God's world. But for purposes of this conversation, I've only mentioned the ethical problems of the atheist. In order to do this, I needed to grant the atheist worldview certain assumptions that I would have otherwise challenged if I were addressing other areas. So I haven't said anything about the ontological or epistemological problems of atheism and to do so would only create confusion and cause a loss of focus. So for this effort, I'll stick to the ethical issues at hand.


"Not all Christians believe in sola scriptura, and they don't cease being Christians because they have a different view of the role of Scripture. Not all Christians are Calvinists, or believe that the law of Moses is a blueprint for civil government. Not all Christians reject science, or an expanded civil government. Some Christians even believe that Jesus was a socialist. And their worldviews are just as Christian as yours. The list of things you have to believe in order to be a Christian is a lot smaller than you seem to think."

I don't really have time to address everything else you've written but I should say something about this. Obviously, we believe that Christians who reject sola scriptura (for example) are wrong. But it is much too simplistic to the point of error that say that we think Moses is a blueprint for the state. And no one here that I know of "rejects science." The last one is so wrong, in fact, that it shows how poorly you understand those you seek to critique. You should probably slow way down, provide fewer attempted criticisms, and ask a lot more questions. And just so you know, I was having conversations with self-described "Christian socialists" 15 years ago. People around here are aware of a quite a bit more than you think they are. Slow down; you can see more that way.
Derrick  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 7:16 am
"And that, Xon, is the best nutshell of my disagreement with your fundamental premise that I've seen: That your viewpoint is the only "Christian" viewpoint. It isn't merely that there are other worldviews out there, but there are other Christian worldviews out there too."

I think I can say this quickly. I should have used this in conjunction with my last point above. Apart from not answering Xon's question about your interest in playing the atheist's advocate, this once again shows a misunderstanding. Nowhere in here does Xon say or imply that there isn't a variety of beliefs within Christendom. Jabe, Xon is both a philosopher (professionally trained) and an ordained minister. To put it lightly, he's been around the intellectual block a few times. He knows full well about the variety of which you speak (and much more besides). And no one here thinks that other professed Christians aren't Christians simply because they disagree with us on some secondary doctrine or other (e.g., how "active" should the state be in society). We may think they are wrong on that point, but we don't think any less of them as brothers and sisters in Christ. We would still suffer and bleed for them.

Recall that back in the link I provided, you significantly missed what Wilson was saying. And now you've badly mis-described us several times here as well. Once again, I think it would be good to slow down. There are obviously significant disconnects between our views and your understanding of our views. If you hope to make any progress at all here, this needs to be addressed.
Jane Dunsworth  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 8:24 am
"Are you suggesting that in a godless universe otherwise identical to this one,"

A godless universe couldn't possibly be identical to this one, because every aspect of this universe is the way it is because of God.

That's positing a universe where atoms were made of cream cheese and then asking us to speculate about whether internal combustion engines would still work. The answer is either no, or how the heck should I know?
DHammer  - Dog Fred  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 2:12 pm
I don't see that anyone has responded to the "Dog Fred" argument.

"Michael, here's the answer you would get from an atheist: "If I were to say, 'Authority does not have ontological status apart from my pet goat Fred; without Fred, there is no language, no authority, it's all just matter in motion,' you would immediately see how ridiculous an argument that is. Why is it a better argument when you substitute "God" for "Fred"?"

This seems fairly straight forward. Fred the Dog is finite and contingent, whereas God is infinite, not contigent and created Fred along with everything else. God therefore is the ultimate (and only) reference to which Fred the Dog and Jabe the Person derive their ontological status.
Jabe  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 4:56 pm
No, DHammer, you've missed the point of the Fred argument (I actually said "goat", not "dog", but we won't quibble about that since the end result is the same.)

The point is that it's one thing to assert a causal connection (between God and ontology, or between Fred the dog and ontology) but it's another thing entirely to back it up. You've made a bald, unsupported assertion, as if it were self-evident, that ontology has no existence apart from God. Well, you may be right, but you haven't proven it, and simply making the assertion isn't proof. Just as I could baldly assert that without my pet Fred ontology is impossible, but making the assertion isn't proof. The immediate reaction is, What does one have to do with the other?

And the only reason anyone takes the assertion seriously when you make it about God is that since you've made it about God, a lot of people just nod their heads in agreement without thinking it through. Fred, on the other hand, gets no such consideration, meaning anyone making the assertion about Fred will have to be prepared to back it up.
Charles Long  - re:  Tuesday, April 20, 2010 7:14 pm
Jabe,

I have a few questions. From what I can tell, you value the validity of an argument. I mean, you'd generally prefer a logical argument over an illogical one, for example.

But I have also noticed that you seem to place a high value on rationality. Given the atheistic presumption (that we men are not created, but are rather the result of time and chance acting on matter -- the "accidental man"); given this, can you give a rational reason why we ought to restrict all our arguments to logical ones?
Gianni  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 12:22 am

Not all may be aware that Xon has posted a follow-up reply to Jabe. Scroll up. Xon's line of criticism is wise and well worth considering and pursuing.

I said it before. The comment section is designed in a poor way in this respect, and the problem is expecially apparent in long conversations. If you use the "reply" option, your post will not appear at the end of the webpage, where it is easier to spot, but will appear right after whatever post you are replying to. Since that could be anywhere, the person you respond to may never even notice your reply. It's also very bothersome to have to endlessly scroll up and down a long conversation to check for new messages.
Gianni  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:13 am

Jabe, let's go back to the beginning.

"I believe this is called the fallacy of the false alternative. You have offered a polar opposite either/or and completely ignored all the other possibilities."

Wilson has not ignored all the other possibilities. His position is that they are all covered one way or the other by his snappy two-category scheme. This is apparent to anybody who has followed this blog for some time, who have read his books, or who are generally literate in Reformed apologetics and theonomic studies. People who are unaware of his background, and who don't know why he would say that, hopefully will be challenged and motivated to think about it, sit and listen, do research, ask questions.

Nothing of this even remotely implies that only those who agree with his Reformed position are Christians. If you disagree with him at this point, Wilson (and everybody here) will tell you that you are not thinking like a Christian, not that you are not a Christian.

How so? Can Wilson prove that? Can he go beyond simple asssertions? Can he answer atheistic objections? And what about the Methodists? What about Shinto objections? Can Wilson solve the mystery of Fred the Goat? Can he say anything about what the world would be like if God didn't exist? And what if atoms were made of cream cheese? Of course Wilson can sit with you and talk about all these things. You haven't said anything which hasn't been adequately covered some place or another.

But if you raise these issues because you don't know what he thinks, then you need to ask questions and read relevant literature before you come here accusing him of logical fallacies. So as for your original argument, rest assured that Wilson has not ignored the other possibilities at all.

But in the middle of the discussion you also told me:

"You and Doug have painted yourselves into a theological corner because you've adopted premises that necessarily lead to preposterous conclusions."

Yes, but we brought our guitars. So we'll sit down and jam until the paint dries up. Then we'll paint the corner as well. You see, there are no exits, the whole floor must be painted, and there's no other way of doing it.

Can I go beyond assertions? Am I presupposing a whole lot of theological stuff? Yes, of course, but notice that this is a separate argument you are making: "you've adopted premises that necessarily lead to preposterous conclusions". To this I simply reply that seen from here, from my premises, there's nothing more preposterous than what you are trying to say. No, wait, there is one thing. It's when you tell me "you should re-examine your premises" on the grounds that you find our conclusions preposterous. That is a preposterous prospect to me, the ultimate preposterousness. I can't but sing "La la la", Hey Jude style. But try to see our conclusions from the vantage point of our premises, and tell me if they still sound preposterous.

So you are not going to impress and convince anybody here by telling them that they are preposterous. That only indicates to us that you must have profound disagreements with Wilson which probably can't be covered and properly discussed to your satisfaction in seventeen weeks. But we know who Douglas Wilson is, where he is coming from, and what things he is assuming we already know every time he posts an article, but who are you? What do you believe? What is your angle, from which Wilson looks so preposterous? Why should we laugh along?

You jump in like a Mongolian farrier telling us a joke that only works if we know something about equine hooves and if we are fluent in Mongolian. Give some indication that you are coming from an angle that has not been extensively dealt with by Wilson or his friends anywhere else, because so far you come across as saying nothing we haven't heard before. The Mongolian joke so far, as far as we understand it, reminds us closely of a number of bad jokes we heard already and that simply don't work, for reasons which are too many to list here, because now the paint finally looks dry, and I have to finish a job.

This is why you accomplish exactly nothing with your posts, except sounding uninformed. And preposterous.

jon Erik Ween  - Absolute power  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 4:00 am
Well, this thread seems to have heated up! Would that we all kept cool.

I think one thing we need to keep in mind is the eternal maxim that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". This applies to collectives as well as to individuals. Investing government with absolute power leads inevitably to an absolutely corrupted government, vis: The reign of terror after the French revolution (as opposed to the then contemporary American experience). So, "thievery" is simply a manifestation of this absolute corruption. We need to be careful what we ask for: If we ask for America to "grow up" and get in step with the rest of the civilized world (ie: have a centralized and autocratic government) we will get one. This is why the founding fathers distributed power, and why we should continue to do so.

One near-to-home example is north of the 49th parallel: http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/mindelle_jacobs/2010/04/19/13644221.html

God's blessing to you all

Jon
jon Erik Ween  - Absolute power  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 4:00 am
Well, this thread seems to have heated up! Would that we all kept cool, and on-topic.

I think one thing we need to keep in mind is the eternal maxim that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely". This applies to collectives as well as to individuals. Investing government with absolute power leads inevitably to an absolutely corrupted government, vis: The reign of terror after the French revolution (as opposed to the then contemporary American experience). So, "thievery" is simply a manifestation of this absolute corruption. We need to be careful what we ask for: If we ask for America to "grow up" and get in step with the rest of the civilized world (ie: have a centralized and autocratic government) we will get one. This is why the founding fathers distributed power, and why we should continue to do so.

One near-to-home example is north of the 49th parallel: http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/mindelle_jacobs/2010/04/19/13644221.html

God's blessing to you all

Jon
Jabe  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 6:00 am
Charles, first, two nits.

1. The only atheistic presumption is the non-existence of any deity. Past that, atheists are all over the map on what they affirmatively do believe. There is no "atheist presumption" that man is the result of time and chance acting on matter (though there are some atheists who do believe that).

2. At this point, I think most scientists believe in a deterministic rather than a random universe (even though those two universes look a lot alike for most practical purposes). So your "accidental man" premise is also mistaken -- given what is known about evolution, the evolution of man was inevitable once the process got underway.

To answer your main question about why we should restrict our arguments to logical ones, it's because in practice logic works more often than illogic does. And if you don't believe me, try spending a day doing only illogical things and making illogical assumptions, and report back on how it went.
Jabe  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 6:15 am
Gianni writes:

"Nothing of this even remotely implies that only those who agree with his Reformed position are Christians. If you disagree with him at this point, Wilson (and everybody here) will tell you that you are not thinking like a Christian, not that you are not a Christian."

And my point is that there is no such thing as "thinking like a Christian" because Christian thought is all over the map. There is no such thing as a single, unified school of Christian thought on government, the role of Scripture, church polity, the origins of human life, science, or much else. It isn't merely that I can believe in evolution and still be a Christian; it's that belief in evolution isn't incompatible with Christian thought.

Gianni further writes:

"But if you raise these issues because you don't know what he thinks, then you need to ask questions and read relevant literature before you come here accusing him of logical fallacies. So as for your original argument, rest assured that Wilson has not ignored the other possibilities at all."

Oh, I'm well versed in them; our fundamental disagreement continues to be your (and Doug's) insistence that there is but two alternatives with only one answer to any given question. As I said earlier, in the context of this particular thread, that's doubly wrong; there is more than one answer as a matter of logic, and there is more than one answer as a matter of Christian thought.

Gianni writes:

"But try to see our conclusions from the vantage point of our premises, and tell me if they still sound preposterous."

I understand your premises and your conclusions; I was raised and educated Reformed. And where I think the disconnect lies is in your unwillingness to test your premises against the real world. If I take Premise X, and meticulously follow it to its most logical conclusion, only to find that it necessarily leads me to the conclusion that 2 + 2 = 6, then I know that no matter how good my logic may be, there's a problem. If my logic was sound starting from the premise, then the premise is the most likely place to look for a problem.

And that's the step you don't take.
Charles Long  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 7:05 am
Jabe,

You say logic "works more often" than illogic. But to what end, Jabe? What does it work better for? You seem to have this crazy idea in your head that there is a purpose for our verbal discourse, but my challenge to you is to show that this is a rational idea.

You've laid down your (rhetorical) presumption of our non-created status; but what I'm asking you to do is show how you got from there all the way to the idea that there is this end toward which some things work better than others. You've been a little sloppy in assuming so many things between here and there -- I'm asking you to show your math. Prove that your penchant for order, meaning and internal consistency is a rational penchant.

Is this an unreasonable request, Jabe?
Jabe  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 7:55 am
Charles, the beauty of logic is that it works better toward any end anyone wants to adopt. Whether you believe that you're just a bit of protoplasm with no higher end than to enjoy pleasure while you can, or whether you believe that you're made in the image of God and have a duty to be a good steward of your image-bearing, logic will get you there. Logic will tell you, once you've decided where you want to go, how to get there. Most of the time it won't tell you where you want to go. Kind of like a highway map.

Now, if your question is why should any particular end be a better choice than any other particular end, it's in our nature. Humans organize communities, we build cities, we make scientific discoveries, we take pleasure in our families, we make art and music, we ponder the meaning of life. It's what we do. And again, it makes no difference (to this particular discussion, anyway) whether you believe we got that nature from God or from millions of years of evolutionary psychology, that's what we do. And asking "why" is no more meaningful than asking the bee why she collects necter and takes it back to the hive, or a salmon why she swims upstream hundreds of miles to spawn (avoiding bears and man-made dams all the way).
Tim Enloe  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 9:09 am
It might be worth pointing out that the tactic of focusing on WHY? is this that or the other thing epistemologically legitimate is a purely defensive maneuver invented by the Van Tillian sub-school of Reformed theology. It had to be invented because Van Tillians have given up on the possibility of real natural knowledge coming to fallen man through the created instrument of reason.

Unlike our forefathers in the Reformation itself, the Scholastic Reformed period and all the way up until Van Til's self-described "Copernican Revolution" in epistemology, Reformed people assumed the classical notion that the mind created in God's image was created to know both God and His creation, and that, accordingly, it was capable of knowing both God and His creation. The default position, in other words, was that knowledge through reason is possible - NOT that knowledge through reason is NOT possible and so what we have to do is just make sure we read our Bibles a lot.

Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically in the poetic sense, the contentious and sectarian Van Til took the Enlightenment's critique of religion too seriously and decided the answer to the Age of Reason was Kant's retreat from rational faith. (John Frame basically admits this in his excellent study of Van Til, which I highly recommend precisely for the the things it admits that other Van Tillians don't want to touch with a ten foot pole). Like Kant, Van Til started whittling down reason to "make room for faith" - in this case, the Reformed Faith, which to his mind was the only "consistent" form of Christianity, everything else being "autonomy," or rebellious self-law.

And so, after 100 years of this skepticism / fideism about the Reformed Faith, we arrive here, where we can't even talk about practical politics without demanding that the Bible be consulted, not merely as the only infallible rule of faith (the classical Reformation position of sola Scriptura) but as the only reliable rule of faith (the Radical Reformation's principle of solo Scriptura).

Alas for us all, this was not only NOT classical Christianity, but was also not the view of the Reformers. The Reformers knew how to carry on political arguments WITHOUT talking vaguely about "presuppositions" and "glorious circles" precisely because they were thoroughly trained in the classical tradition. Calvin's doctrine of lesser magistrates is assurely informed by Scripture, but it is not a product of a mind reasoning from "the Bible Alone." Calvin is, in fact, heavily indebted to the Medieval political tradition, which is packed full of really interesting discussions about the limitations of rulers under God. Those discussions cite Scripture and engage with it constantly, but they do NOT treat the Bible as if it is not only the court of last appeal (only infallible rule) but also the court of first appeal (only reliable rule).

Calvin was a Renaissance humanist, and that is precisely why he spends so much time in the Institutes engaging classical pagan authors. That is also precisely why lots of Reformed people, in the grip of Van Til's revolt against classical Reformed theology, are uncomfortable enough with Calvin that they have to write articles wondering if Calvin took Cicero too seriously, and so forth.

All of that is just to say that that's why some on this thread keep demanding that all the time be spent on epistemological pretzels about WHY we ought to accept this or that position that doesn't "start with the Bible." Epistemological pretzels that are simplistically alleged to have only one proper solution drawn from a (false) dualism are the Van Tillian's bread and butter. The whole discussion has been skewed from the start by the confusion between solo Scriptura and sola Scriptura.

And in light of all this, Gianni's prideful remark about Reformed people being in the "faithful and consistent 5%" of Christians who get all this right is surely a warning to those who are historically informed: this stuff is NOT classical Reformed theology, but is rather a revolutionary flight from the majority of the tradition, which has, I guess, been flushed down the memory hole because it doesn't support the contentiousness of the purely sectarian variety of Reformed theology. It is also a warning for those who take the Apostles Paul and James seriously: we all (not just the 95%) see through a glass darkly, and the Lord opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
Jane Dunsworth  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 10:07 am
Tim, just keep in mind that the 5% figure and the assertion that only 5% of Christians believe that there is no authority that does not descend from God was Jabe's assertion, not Gianni's. Gianni was playing along with it. Frankly, leaving aside the deeper Van Tillian depths and sticking only to the concept itself, I think that's a ridiculous assertion. 95% of Christians surely aren't Van Tillian -- but I daresay far, far more than 5% understand that "God or something else" is the set of alternatives to any question, and that it's rather hard to posit a "something else" that sits at the top of the authority heap unless you posit that the something else is itself self-existent. They may not use that language, but I suspect Christians DO tend to think that way, due to believing Jesus is King of Kings and so forth.
Derrick  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:00 pm
Jabe said:

"To answer your main question about why we should restrict our arguments to logical ones, it's because in practice logic works more often than illogic does. And if you don't believe me, try spending a day doing only illogical things and making illogical assumptions, and report back on how it went."

Once again, this begs the question by presupposing pragmatism. Ignoring issues that are on the table doesn't make them go away. But this piece of pragmatism is especially interesting. It will surprise many logicians to know that logic gets its justification from (1) its performance in particular instances out in the world and (2) observations made of such performance. After all, there's a reason logic is talked about as 'a priori' whereas experience is talked about as 'a posteriori'. You do realize how radical and uncommon your claim is in the annals of epistemology, right? Could you name some logic textbooks that argue for such a point?

But let's press a little harder. As it turns out, this claim of yours assumes that pragmatism itself cannot be tested by logic since the validation of logic presupposes pragmatism. Does this mean that for you, pragmatism is the highest epistemological standard? Sola pragmatica perhaps? But we must use logic in order to formulate and articulate pragmatism. So we are already stuck in a nasty circle. And it gets nastier when we notice that you have made an infinitesimally small number of observations about the effectiveness of logic (when compared to the entirety of time and space). This commits the fallacy of hasty generalization and this means that logic, which was supposed to be justified by pragmatism, has risen up and bit its master. During the very attempt to pragmatically justify logic, logic came back and complained that you committed a fallacy. Talk about ungrateful (not to mention ironic).

Moreover, in an evolving world of matter in motion, how do you know that changes at the quantum level have not already begun a relatively quick process whose end will result in irrationality actually being more pragmatic than rationality? Then again, everything is in flux; therefore the laws of logic are in flux. The principle of pragmatism is in flux.

Moreover finally, even if I granted you everything else, why should any evolving, carbon-based bag of mostly water care about what works? What if not caring sometimes results in competitive evolutionary advantages?

But enough of these generalities… let's get our hands dirty and see an example. Please justify motus ponens by giving a non-fallacious proof that it works more often than not. I know that this cannot be done, but since I don't think you understand what you are claiming here, the failed exercise could prove instructive.


"And my point is that there is no such thing as "thinking like a Christian" because Christian thought is all over the map. There is no such thing as a single, unified school of Christian thought on government, the role of Scripture, church polity, the origins of human life, science, or much else. It isn't merely that I can believe in evolution and still be a Christian; it's that belief in evolution isn't incompatible with Christian thought."

This is like saying that God never said something intelligible about X because there are different views of X held by Christians -- a whopper of a non sequitur. Imagine for a minute that you have written a wonderfully lucid and accurate textbook on economics. Many students read your book, but (a) some students misapply it because they don't really understand what you've written, (b) some students claim to believe what you've written but they subtly and "subconsciously" reinterpret what you've written to fit their preconceived views, and (c) some students claim to accept your book but they don't believe in "literal interpretation." Perhaps they employ subjective, wishful interpretations based upon purely secular ideas generated by unbelievers to change some things and add others. The failure is with the students, not the textbook.

"Thinking like a Christian" simply means thinking the way God has told us in His word to think. Whatever the specific content of that thinking may be for a given subject, this general statement is pretty much a tautology. And God's word does not somehow lose authority or pass out of existence because of man's sin and ignorance. You've effectively said that there is no right answer to or underlying standard for X because we disagree on what that answer/standard is. This is terrible, and I know you don't apply this differences-proves-no-right-answer idea consistently. Otherwise, "There is no such thing as 'thinking scientifically' because scientists and philosophers are all over the map on what science is and how it should operate." Otherwise, "There is no such thing as 'behaving like a Christian' because Christians are all over the map on how we should behave." And on and on we could go.

Jabe, God has given us quite a bit of information regarding how we are to behave and think. This point should be completely obvious. Our disagreements over the details of this hardly show that God has not actually given us such.


"I understand your premises and your conclusions…"

I believe I've shown various examples of how you don't.


"Now, if your question is why should any particular end be a better choice than any other particular end, it's in our nature. Humans organize communities, we build cities, we make scientific discoveries, we take pleasure in our families, we make art and music, we ponder the meaning of life. It's what we do. And again, it makes no difference (to this particular discussion, anyway) whether you believe we got that nature from God or from millions of years of evolutionary psychology, that's what we do. And asking "why" is no more meaningful than asking the bee why she collects necter and takes it back to the hive, or a salmon why she swims upstream hundreds of miles to spawn (avoiding bears and man-made dams all the way)."

Another naturalist fallacy. This has already been addressed. Moreover, this is more question begging pragmatism, and it isn't even very good pragmatism at that. For example, you have assumed a monolithic thing called "human nature." But this is clearly an error. There are many people in the world that are clearly not wired in the way that you suggest (e.g., they don't like community, they don't take pleasure in family, etc. etc.). In fact, there is a huge and conflicting variety of human behaviors, likes, dislikes, etc. What human nature? Prove it (from neurochemistry of course). And why should that nature not evolve all over the place just like everything else evolves? There are more "human natures" than there are types of finches. For those many who are of a different nature than yours, they are simply doing what is in their natures: living away from cities, spurning family, raping, pillaging, and killing. And asking "why" is no more meaningful than asking the bee why she collects nectar and takes it back to the hive, or a salmon why she swims upstream hundreds of miles to spawn (avoiding bears and man-made dams all the way). And claiming that they ought not to do those things is no more meaningful than claiming that water at sea level should not boil at 373.15K.
Jabe  - re:  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:37 pm
Derrick wrote:


Once again, this begs the question by presupposing pragmatism.


OK, stop right there. Tim did a fairly thorough job of explaining that incessantly asking "why" is a defense mechanism that has little basis in reality. The short answer is that maybe YOU require an explanation for why pleasure is preferable to pain (except perhaps to a masochist), but the rest of us have already figured that out, thank you very much. And if you honestly doubt that pleasure is preferable to pain, feel free to stick your hand on a hot stove and report back. If you choose to disregard senses and experience, then nothing I or anyone else has to say will make any difference.

Put another way, logic is the theory; experience is the lab in which the theory is tested. I know of no logician who would dispute that.

And no, pragmatism can't be tested by pure logic, for the same reason blood pressure can't be tested with a thermometer. That doesn't mean a thermometer doesn't have its own uses. Pragmatism does, however, have a habit of confirming by experience what pure logic posited as theory.

As for monolithic human nature, yes, there are hermits, people who don't love their children, and nihilists who set out to destroy what other people have built. However, they live at the fringes of society, and if they ever became a majority, society's ability to cntinue to exist would be in doubt.

And yes, God did say intelligible things about some subjects, one of which is "woe unto him who says, 'thus says the Lord,' when the Lord has not spoken."
Gianni  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:51 pm

Tim, you read Van Til with the same care with which you read me.

Jane is right and careful as always, and I agree completely with what she says.

Jane, thank you.
Jabe  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:56 pm
I don't know if this is a true story or not, but supposedly during the Middle Ages a group of monks was having a discussion about how many teeth a horse has. And after spending hours using logic, appealing to the early church fathers, and searching the scriptures, one of them finally spoke up and said, "There's a horse outside; why don't we just go out and count his teeth?" He was kicked out of the meeting.

Jabe says, Count the horse's teeth. Derrick says, Prove by logic that counting will work, and also why it should work, and also why anyone should care. Jabe says, Derrick, I may never convince you, but at least I'll know how many teeth the horse has.
Gianni  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 1:56 pm

[Gianni] "Nothing of this even remotely implies that only those who agree with his Reformed position are Christians. If you disagree with him at this point, Wilson (and everybody here) will tell you that you are not thinking like a Christian, not that you are not a Christian."
[Jabe] "And my point is that there is no such thing as "thinking like a Christian" because Christian thought is all over the map."

Oh, but Jabe, of course by "thinking like a Christian" I meant "thinking like a Christian SHOULD." That renders the fact that "Christian thought is all over the map" irrelevant. It is our position that there is an objective, accessible, and authoritative standard by which we can and should tell whether someone is thinking like a Christian should think.

Now you will no doubt object that also this is nonsense, because Christians are all over the map even about THAT. However, you must be using some such standard or criterion yourself, since nothing seems to interest you more than telling me that I am not thinking straight, i.e. like a Christian should think, about the issue of thinking like a Christian. Am I not an example of how Christian thought is all over the map? So why am I in need of your correction? What's wrong with Douglas Wilson? If your position is correct, why did you come here and start this conversation?

The fundamental flaw in your line of reasoning is that you are simply objecting to our position by asserting yours. That is, what you are saying (or, your "point", as you call it here) is a position about these things: it is not the reality about these things. You hate it when Wilson confidently speaks his mind on the assumption that his position is correct. You are quick to remind him that there are other viewpoints. But you do the same thing. For example when you say that "belief in evolution isn't incompatible with Christian thought", you are not telling us the truth of the matter, much as you wish you were: you are only telling us what your position is. But there are other positions about that. Take me, for example. I disagree with you about that. Now what?

"Oh, I'm well versed in them"

I don't understand what you mean. You are well versed in them what? No sarcasm intended: I'm sure you must be well versed in something, although I can't think of an example right now. I know you only from your posts.

"our fundamental disagreement continues to be your (and Doug's) insistence that there is but two alternatives with only one answer to any given question."

When did I or Wilson insist that there is but two alternatives with only one answer to any given question? What does it even mean? I believe that there are many questions where several different answers are all good and acceptable.

"As I said earlier, in the context of this particular thread, that's doubly wrong; there is more than one answer as a matter of logic, and there is more than one answer as a matter of Christian thought."

You pretend I didn't explain this one. Wilson has not ignored the alternatives that you want him to contemplate and include in the list. On close analysis, all the billions and billions of alternatives you have in mind end up in either one of his categories. That's his position, which has been argued persuasively against all the best objections as far as I am concerned. As for the competing Christian positions, they are the result of failing to think as a Christian should think. Again that's his position, which has been also argued persuasively against all the best objections as far as I am concerned.

"And where I think the disconnect lies is in your unwillingness to test your premises against the real world."

What unwillingness? What do you know about my willingness and my unwillingness to do anything? Do I know you?

"If I take Premise X, and meticulously follow it to its most logical conclusion, only to find that it necessarily leads me to the conclusion that 2 + 2 = 6, then I know that no matter how good my logic may be, there's a problem. If my logic was sound starting from the premise, then the premise is the most likely place to look for a problem. And that's the step you don't take."

I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Jabe  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 5:50 pm
Gianni, it is late in my time zone, I think we're talking past one another and the law of diminishing returns has already kicked in, ao I'm going to respond briefly to your most recent post and then if you want to have the last word, it's yours.

When I say I'm well versed in your theology, it means I was raised on R. L. Dabney, Van Til, Kuyper, and other leading lights of the theonomic movement (or what is now called theonomy; I'm not sure the term had been coined in the time of Dabney). If Rushdoony and Bahnsen had been writing when I was a child, I would have been raised on them too. I took a course with Frame, before he became famous. So whatever differences we have theologically, it isn't because I don't understand where you're coming from. (And FWIW, I think Tim was right on the mark with his comments on Van Til; that's my reading too.)

As far as thinking like a Christian, I simply don't believe we have clear and unambiguous divine guidance on nearly as many issues as you do. I think you filter your reading of the Bible through your own worldview, as do I, as does everybody else, and a lot of what you find in the Bible is stuff you find because it's what you started out looking for. You hate government social programs so you find biblical authority against them, just as the Christian socialists find biblical support for them. And I'm an old man who has lived long enough to see the danger in selectivly biblicizing one's personal biases. And maybe, just maybe, biblicizing one's biases is only possible in the first place because the Bible wasn't intended to be the final word anyway; sola scriptura is a fairly recent arrival in church history.

As far as applying your premises to the real world, since we're on the subject of Obama nation building, have you seriously thought through the massive human suffering that would ensue if all those social programs you despise actually were to shut down? The church couldn't stand in the gap; it doesn't have the resources (and it did a poor job at it before those programs were passed, or they wouldn't have been passed in the first place). Yes, children really would go hungry and people really would die of preventable maladies and families really would live in the woods. I remember the depression; people actually did starve to death and men really did commit suicide becaues they couldn't feed their familities. And maybe you don't care about any of that; maybe you do; you're right, I don't know you. But if your premises lead you to that kind of human suffering, you can have them. That's what I mean by testing them against the real world.

OK, it's late and I'm going to bed.
Derrick  Wednesday, April 21, 2010 8:14 pm
“OK, stop right there. Tim did a fairly thorough job of explaining that incessantly asking "why" is a defense mechanism that has little basis in reality. The short answer is that maybe YOU require an explanation for why pleasure is preferable to pain (except perhaps to a masochist), but the rest of us have already figured that out, thank you very much. And if you honestly doubt that pleasure is preferable to pain, feel free to stick your hand on a hot stove and report back. If you choose to disregard senses and experience, then nothing I or anyone else has to say will make any difference.”

What I’ve been doing here is clearly not a “defense mechanism” but an offensive mechanism. And once again, you have missed the point. Once again, I have not tried to affirm or deny any specific fact or alternative (e.g., pleasure or pain). I have been pointing out in a number of ways and for various reasons that while you are playing the atheist’s advocate, you have no basis (other than electro-chemically determined, mutable, subjective preference) for anything that you’ve asserted. I don’t require an explanation for such and such, YOU as the atheist’s advocate (or is much of this your own conviction; it’s beginning to look that way) are required to provide such an explanation without relying on anything that God has given you (e.g., ethical principles, the uniformity of nature, generally reliable sense perception, laws of logic, the ability to meaningfully relate unity and diversity). I am not denying any particular fact of the world, I am denying the atheist’s ability to make sense out of that fact (or any fact). And by implication, I am denying the assumption you’ve been making: that God is pretty much irrelevant to many important aspects of life and the world. Whether or not He exists, things would be pretty much what they are now. This is not “thinking like a Christian.”


“Put another way, logic is the theory; experience is the lab in which the theory is tested. I know of no logician who would dispute that.”

In that case, you don’t know too many logicians. Logic is not a theory Jabe. Neither is it tested by experience. It is one of the things that allows us to formulate, critique, and discuss any theory. In philosophy, it is known as a ‘transcendental’ (thanks to Kant). It is not something that you know via experience, it is something by which you are able to experience at all. And once again, if you don’t understand my critique of your view of logic given above, I’ll make it simple by repeating my test case. Please show how motus ponens is (1) a theory that (2) is tested by experience. I’m not asking you to discuss some obscure aspect of second order predicate logic, I’m simply asking you to demonstrate your claim with respect to a basic aspect of propositional logic.


“And no, pragmatism can't be tested by pure logic, for the same reason blood pressure can't be tested with a thermometer.”

I must admit that this is a new one for me. A thermometer tests for temperature, not pressure. Thus, it would be a category mistake to try and test the latter using the former. It would be like asking, “What is the velocity of yellow?” It’s not just an error of degree, it’s one of kind. A thermometer is simply irrelevant as far as BP is concerned. And so you are saying that logic is simply irrelevant as far as the human-devised theory of pragmatism is concerned. But apart from the shear absurdity of this claim, something interesting happened on the way to this “untouchability.” I used logic to critique it. And so to be quite practical here, experience has proven that this claim is incorrect. Now perhaps you meant something more limited by saying “pure” logic, but as it stands, this is just plain weird. No pragmatist philosopher would claim that logic is irrelevant to pragmatism. Just for starters, if that were true it would mean that pragmatism could be both true and self-refuting. The pragmatist philosophers that I’ve read are much better than that.


“As for monolithic human nature, yes, there are hermits, people who don't love their children, and nihilists who set out to destroy what other people have built. However, they live at the fringes of society, and if they ever became a majority, society's ability to cntinue to exist would be in doubt.”

This is known as the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen this one used. But even apart from this fallacy, you haven’t begun to deal with the huge variety of likes/dislikes, “cultures,” behaviors, etc. of people and you haven’t begun to address the implications of their natures (you know, the ones that you don’t approve of) with respect to your “it just is” approach or the randomness of it all in a world of evolving, colliding atoms. As I said, this particular example wasn’t even good pragmatism.


“Jabe says, Count the horse's teeth. Derrick says, Prove by logic that counting will work, and also why it should work, and also why anyone should care. Jabe says, Derrick, I may never convince you, but at least I'll know how many teeth the horse has.”

Jabe, you haven’t even engaged the real discussion yet. I also know how many teeth the horse has, but only because we live in the world that Yahweh created from nothing and completely sustains at every given moment. The fact that you think this has all been about proving some particular facts of nature to me (and you’ve made this mistake several times now) shows that you have yet to engage the real discussion.

Here’s the thing. You came in here seemingly sure that you were going to use some educated, enlightened sensibility to correct us troglodyte, medieval fundies. But things didn’t go as planned. You made numerous mistakes (including some rather bizarre ones) regarding what we believe, and then you proceeded to make a mess of the subjects you tried to counsel us on. You were going to give us a lesson in logic and show us the importance of learning about alternative views. But it turns out that we were already familiar with many other views, and when I cross-examined your lesson in logic, you bypassed most of what I wrote and ran for the cover of naïve empiricism. But that leaky sieve won’t protect you either. Naïve empiricism (NE) is dead, and it was killed by secular philosophers many moons ago. Ironically enough, one of the only groups to consistently hold to NE and to do so self-consciously is conservative Christian evidentialist apologists.

Look, I understand if I’ve brought up material that you aren’t familiar with and that you may not be able to process very well. That’s fine; there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. But if you come on here when the Pastor is waxing philosophically, you get into a debate loaded with philosophy, you proceed to make various philosophically related claims, and you make all kinds of philosophically loaded and debatable assumptions, you shouldn’t be surprised when people cross-examine your claims at a level of rigor that both they and the subject demands. If you present ideas that presuppose other unbiblical or fallacious ideas, people are going to call you on it.
Jabe  Thursday, April 22, 2010 4:14 am
Derrick, it's apparent you have the philosophical jargon down without having internalized or understood any of the concepts. Let me just hit a few of the high points, then like I said to Gianni, I think we're talking past one another and it's time to move on.

1. If I can demonstrate that a phenomenon exists, I don't have to explain why. In fact, "why" is often a meaningless inquiry. Why does water boil at a certain temperature? Because it does. Why do humans act in a certain way? Because they do (most often because the survival of the species depends on it). That you don't find that answer satisfactory is irrelevant.

And if the answer is "electro-chemically determined, mutable, subjective preference," then what's your point? If you can show that there's no such thing as objective morality, what's your point? Maybe there is no sense to any of it. In that case, that's the way things are, and the fact that you want there to be sense or objective morality or anything else is irrelevant. All of that would merely make atheism unpleasant, not necessarily untrue.

2. I never said logic was "a theory". Rather, it's theoretical. It's like taking a college biology course, where you learn theory in the classroom and then go to the laboratory to test the theory out. Likewise, to take a famous syllogism, "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal." That's pure theory. Experience allows us to visit Socrates' grave (if anyone knows where it is) and see for ourselves that Socrates was indeed mortal and our logic is valid. If Socrates were not mortal -- if he continued to live forever -- then our experience would tell us something's wrong with our logic.

And most of your logic simply doesn't conform to experience, which is why I keep telling you to go back and check it. That doesn't mean that logic's methodology is wrong; it means you've misapplied it. And checking results against experience is a great way to tell if you've misapplied logic.

3. As for monolithic human nature, it would have been the no true scotsman fallacy if I had said that no human would be a hermit or lack affection for their children. But that's not what I said. What I said is that there are such people, and they live at the fringes of society, but the fact that you can find anomolies doesn't mean the rule isn't generally true. (Occasionally someone is born with six digits on each hand rather than five, but that doesn't change the general rule that people have five digits on each hand.)

And this is actually a good example of Darwinian natural selection at work. The human behaviors I described earlier are those behaviors that are optimal for a healthy society. Societies that don't practice those behaviors either die out fairly quickly or remain stunted and are quickly taken over by other societies.
TBush  - Huh?  Thursday, April 22, 2010 5:24 am
"And this is actually a good example of Darwinian natural selection at work. The human behaviors I described earlier are those behaviors that are optimal for a healthy society. Societies that don't practice those behaviors either die out fairly quickly or remain stunted and are quickly taken over by other societies."

Oh- you actually do believe in Darwinsim?
Jabe  - re: Huh?  Thursday, April 22, 2010 7:40 am
TBush wrote:


Oh- you actually do believe in Darwinsim?


Some of it. I already said I didn't think it was incompatible with Christianity.
Derrick  Thursday, April 22, 2010 9:07 am
"1. If I can demonstrate that a phenomenon exists, I don't have to explain why. In fact, "why" is often a meaningless inquiry. Why does water boil at a certain temperature? Because it does. Why do humans act in a certain way? Because they do (most often because the survival of the species depends on it). That you don't find that answer satisfactory is irrelevant."

Once again, you have lost track of context. The various phenomena that exist today do so because we are living in the Father's world. When talking about counterfactuals such as a Fatherless universe, you obviously can't use His gifts as part of your explanation. I've never simply asked you why something exists, I've asked you to defend atheism (since you seemed to want to do so). The question is not "What exists in the hear and now?" but "Can we account for and make sense of what exists and of the various concepts and ideological assumptions the we employ?" And this big picture question is necessary because of the specific question at hand: is the concept of "authority" meaningful in a world without the Father? You haven't come close to showing that the answer to this is "yes," and if you agree that the best you can do is to point to physical phenomena that do what they do because that's what they do, then we agree that the answer is "no."


"And if the answer is "electro-chemically determined, mutable, subjective preference," then what's your point? If you can show that there's no such thing as objective morality, what's your point? Maybe there is no sense to any of it. In that case, that's the way things are, and the fact that you want there to be sense or objective morality or anything else is irrelevant. All of that would merely make atheism unpleasant, not necessarily untrue."

Once again, you have lost track of the argument. The original claim was that in a godless universe, there would be no authority, only power. You objected, and I replied. To repeat, if you now agree that ethics is a meaningless concept in such a world, then that's good enough for me.


"2. I never said logic was "a theory". Rather, it's theoretical. It's like taking a college biology course, where you learn theory in the classroom and then go to the laboratory to test the theory out. Likewise, to take a famous syllogism, "All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal." That's pure theory. Experience allows us to visit Socrates' grave (if anyone knows where it is) and see for ourselves that Socrates was indeed mortal and our logic is valid. If Socrates were not mortal -- if he continued to live forever -- then our experience would tell us something's wrong with our logic.

"And most of your logic simply doesn't conform to experience, which is why I keep telling you to go back and check it. That doesn't mean that logic's methodology is wrong; it means you've misapplied it. And checking results against experience is a great way to tell if you've misapplied logic."

The Socrates example does not show that "the logic is wrong", i.e., invalid. The syllogism is still valid. It's just that one of our premises about the world turned out to be false. In that case, we have not tested logic by way of experience, we have tested one of our factual premises by experience. This is fine and good, but this is not the subject at hand. Earlier, you said:

"we should restrict our arguments to logical ones... because in practice logic works more often than illogic does."

and

"Put another way, logic is the theory; experience is the lab in which the theory is tested."

Both of these are talking about logic, not specific factual claims. The first statement is particularly important. Charles asked you why we should bother to be logical? It's a good question and notice that he is talking about logic, not specific factual claims. And you responded with "we should restrict…". The subject is about logic. I agree; we are talking past each other here. You are using 'logic' in a causal and imprecise manner to refer to something like "the argument taken as a whole" or "explanation." But Charles was asking why were should bother to be rational/logical as opposed to irrational/illogical. We are asking about the philosophical subject known as "logic."

Now in saying that most of my logic doesn't conform…, I assume you are saying that most of my factual claims about an atheist world (since that's a good chunk of what I've been saying) don't conform to this world. And I would agree, none of them conform. (But there are some claims you've addressed that I never made. So for example, I know that people really do prefer pleasure to pain. I never claimed otherwise and my argument doesn't require such.) But once again, this is the Father's world. Counterfactuals are called such for a reason, and the ones we are talking about can't be tested by experience. If one wants to know whether authority would exist in a godless world, there is no physical place in this universe that one can go and look for an answer. So pointing to something in this world, especially if it is an example of authority, won't help you at all.


"3. As for monolithic human nature, it would have been the no true scotsman fallacy if I had said that no human would be a hermit or lack affection for their children. But that's not what I said. What I said is that there are such people, and they live at the fringes of society, but the fact that you can find anomolies doesn't mean the rule isn't generally true. (Occasionally someone is born with six digits on each hand rather than five, but that doesn't change the general rule that people have five digits on each hand.)"

Yes, this marginalizes them to the point of irrelevance. Six sigma outliers that can be safely ignored for purposes of talking about one "nature." "Human nature is monolithic… But what about these humans over here?... Oh, no true human deviates from the monolith. Those guys are on the fringe such that we can ignore them. And thus, there really is a monolith." And thus, the fallacy: some units are ignored for purposes of classification. But as I said, it's much worse than that because the huge variety of human behavior, much of which is not what you would consider good, productive, etc., still exists. And I'll go further and point out something that we've all seen and experienced before. Namely, we see a human that seems to be wired for one behavior and for the opposite behavior as well. For any given unit, it really seems like it has more than one "nature", and there is often conflict between two (or more) of these "natures." And this fact really takes the meat cleaver to the "monolithic human nature" idea. There is no monolith in a single unit much less in all of them taken together. The gene pool is an ocean, and it is tumultuous and ever changing.

And since we're being Darwinian here, I'll go ahead and meander a bit by suggesting that you need to get over your religious hang-ups like "affection for their children." Those little units can be sheltered and raised until they are viable away from such shelter and then they should be kicked out to make room for the next batch. Calling mom several times a week to tell her about your day after you've moved to New York and landed that job with, ahem, Goldman Sachs… religious poppycock. You are getting in the way of the production of the next spawn. In fact, the whole idea of monogamy, while not immediately lethal to a species, clearly has negative consequences. It's best to toss that quaint religious idea and fight for all of the limited resources that you can get your hands on. The female of the species is a ready-bake oven and the male is a mobile sperm bank that spreads it around to maximize the potential for a good harvest. When these two match up and they're both "strong," they can crank out the better adapted ones. If they are both weak, they probably won't last long enough to crack many out and what they do spit out won't be effective either.

And as for love… religious babble. "Love" is just the epiphenomena of electrochemical processes. It is no more meaningful or important than the "feeling" that results from eating bad shellfish. In fact, the latter is much more useful. It tells the animals what is good for food and what isn't, and really bad shellfish can kill off the dumber and/or weaker members. "Love" hamstrings the species by significantly restricting how often the strong procreate. Then again, this is just the shifting gene pool at work. The weaker suckers are rendered sappy and passive by the chemicals you call love while the strong ones are selling them variable rate "ninja" loans or subprime traunches from a mortgage-backed security while spreading their seed and raking in seven-figure bonuses. If we really wanted to advance the pool, we would sink a bunch of money into finding a drug to suppress the "love" chemical response. Perhaps some forced gene therapy to permanently address the problem. Apart from that, the strong could always emulate Margaret Sanger and employ forced sterilization. Let's face it, love is a social disease that muddies up the pool.


"And this is actually a good example of Darwinian natural selection at work. The human behaviors I described earlier are those behaviors that are optimal for a healthy society. Societies that don't practice those behaviors either die out fairly quickly or remain stunted and are quickly taken over by other societies."

I go back to one of the first examples I gave you in the other thread when you made a similar claim: lions eat their young and seem to do fairly well. But I don't think we need to spend much time here since this isn't central. You originally answered a question by saying: "Now, if your question is why should any particular end be a better choice than any other particular end, it's in our nature." My response is that there is a large variety of "natures" / likes & dislikes / behaviors (even within the same unit!) and claiming that one particular unit should behave differently is "as meaningless" (your words) as claiming that plate tectonics should operate differently. That unit is wired the way that unit is wired (and apparently, human neurophysiology allows for some weird and radically shifting current flows and neurochemical combinations that lead to conflicting "natures"). It is what it is. And to tie this back to the argument, trying to force that unit into different behaviors is just that: force, power. It has nothing at all to do with authority. Yes, as I've pointed out several times now, this is Darwinism. There are no imperatives, there is only a teeming mass of ever changing indicatives. (As I've mentioned before, it's actually much worse than that but I can't talk about all of it at the same time.)
Jane Dunsworth  Thursday, April 22, 2010 9:11 am
If you define things broadly enough, then yes, humanity has common values of community and morality that enable us to live together.

But only if you define it REALLY broadly. Sure, every culture has a sense of community, with only sociopaths deviating from it.

Spartans made their men into killing machines, their women into effective concubines, and everybody not native born into slaves. It was a set of community values, and it worked for them.

Mongols under the Great Khans liked other people's stuff and their land and took it. It was a community value, it worked for them.

Aztecs and their cousin tribes needed to keep the sun fed, so they tacitly agreed to conduct non-lethal wars so they could sacrifice each other. Community values and morality, indeed.

The problem with asserting universal human appreciation of pro-community values and then writing off everyone who didn't function within them as "fringe" is that entire cultures have existed whose widely accepted community values created situations of murder, oppression, slavery, and other things utterly repugnant to the kind of society anyone here would wish to live in, let alone promote. The assertion that there are universally held values doesn't collapse in the face of a single sociopath, it just takes a few minutes consideration of most of human history to undermine it. The only way to get around that is to define those "values" so broadly that they're utterly meaningless as a means for discussing the foundations of actual moral behavior. "Working together for the good of the community" is pretty much a universally held value. However, unless we're able to distinguish whether that includes institutionalizing the family for the sake of the military, child sacrifice, or something more along the lines of what 1500 years of gradually emerging Christian culture has taught us to seek after in the West, it's a "value" that has equal potential for glory and horror. And given the widespread acceptance AS CULTURAL GOODS of honor and revenge killing, plunder, adultery, and just about every other morally repugnant practice one could imagine in countless cultures through time and space, I'm not sure you could come up with many others than "it's good or our immediate affinity group to live together in a peaceful society."
Jabe  Thursday, April 22, 2010 11:11 am
No, Derrick, I haven't lost sight of anything. The original question, way back when this thread started, was whether there was any basis for governmental authority in a godless universe. And as I said way back when, in fact there is: It derives its authority from the consent of the governed, just like the Declaration of Independence and Rousseau said.

You then launched into a whole series of mostly irrelevant navel-gazing designed to ignore the metaphysical primary that reality exists. Since that's a metaphysical primary, it is impossible to go back further. Your questions all boil down to: Why is reality what it is? However, the only germane question is: What is reality?

The reality is that humans live in community (or most of us do anyway), and living in community requires following certain rules. Those rules may be different from one community to another, but community is impossible without a structure of some kind. Even children on the playground understand this. And any human who chooses to live in community necessarily gives his assent to being governed by that structure. Ergo, even in a godless universe there is sufficient authority for civil government. And even in a godless universe, protoplasm that's sufficiently organized to be sentient is capable of figuring out what kind of behavior is beneficial and what kind is harmful.

Now, I know up front that you're not going to be satisfied with that answer, but the reason for your dissatisfaction is that I'm not entertaining your "why are things the way they are" attempts to dodge what is a metaphysical primary. And no, that's not raw power (even though it sometimes looks like it). It's governance by the consent of the governed.

Don't read more significance into something than what's actually there.
Jabe  Thursday, April 22, 2010 11:14 am
Jane, you're right on the history. An atheist would reply that you're ignoring the fact that we're further removed from our animal forbears than the Spartans and Greeks were, with the result that our community values have improved. Who said evolution was a completed project?
Jane Dunsworth  Thursday, April 22, 2010 11:55 am
That atheist would be silly. Why should I listen to him? He's not taking into account the Tianmen Square (just over a decade ago) the Taliban (every chance they get), and Mexican drug cartels (as far as I know, still happening at this moment), all of which represent sizable groups of people whose common community interest involves oppressing and slaughtering other people for their own benefit. Evolution can't move THAT fast.

Having dispensed with the factual basis of his argument, can we now discuss the folly of considering human morality an essential fixed, universally agreed-upon thing?
Jabe  Thursday, April 22, 2010 12:46 pm
Ah, but Jane, the difference is that a millenium or two ago, nobody (except their immediate victims) would be raising a fuss over Tianamen Square, the Taliban, or the Mexican drug cartels. Yes, there is still plenty of violence and mass murder, but the difference is that most of the world now recognizes (or at least gives lip service) that there are outer limits on how badly people can be treated. So much so that there are even occasional interventions on behalf of the weak for no reason other than that they're being mistreated.

Evolution doesn't move in a straight line, particularly evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless, it's difficult to make the case that things are no better today than they were a thousand years ago. That doesn't mean there isn't still a long way to go.
Jane Dunsworth  Thursday, April 22, 2010 12:02 pm
So then, are all true Scotsmen socially evolved up to the equivalent of post-Enlightenment, post civil-rights era western society?
Gianni  Thursday, April 22, 2010 4:28 pm

"Gianni, it is late in my time zone, I think we're talking past one another and the law of diminishing returns has already kicked in, ao I'm going to respond briefly to your most recent post and then if you want to have the last word, it's yours."

Ah, but you leave all the meaty details out. You resort to lame generalizations. You move the targets. You build strawmen. You refuse to answer questions. You stick your fingers in your ears and say "la la la, I can't hear you". And your time zone must be very different from mine if the contract doesn't contemplate the sun rising again. On the plus side, you admit that you have no intention to engage my points and that the more I ask questions, the less you intend to answer them, although you could have said it all in a less convoluted way without the euphemisms. Farewell to you too, and God bless you.

"When I say I'm well versed in your theology, it means I was raised on R. L. Dabney, Van Til, Kuyper, and other leading lights of the theonomic movement (or what is now called theonomy; I'm not sure the term had been coined in the time of Dabney). If Rushdoony and Bahnsen had been writing when I was a child, I would have been raised on them too. I took a course with Frame, before he became famous. So whatever differences we have theologically, it isn't because I don't understand where you're coming from."

Sorry, but being raised on something is not at all synonymous with being well versed in it. You prove you are well versed in something in the battlefield, like everybody else.

"And FWIW, I think Tim was right on the mark with his comments on Van Til; that's my reading too."

Well, after his less than stellar performance in this discussion, Tim isn't the first person I would think of if I wanted someone to reliably summarize for me the lyrics of "Happy Birthday To You", let alone the philosophical and historical significance of Cornelius Van Til's apologetics. But you agree with Tim, as you must. Consistency is a harsh master when you're wrong. Good luck without Van Til then.

"As far as thinking like a Christian, I simply don't believe we have clear and unambiguous divine guidance on nearly as many issues as you do."

So I win? But you do seem to be pretty sure we are wrong regarding this topic. Could it be that you're wrong in this belief of yours regarding divine guidance, or do you believe you have unambiguous divine guidance to back up that belief? If the latter, your statement above is misleadingly irrelevant. If the former, your next statement below is comically irrelevant. For then your entire point would be, "I may be wrong, but I think you are wrong."

"I think you filter your reading of the Bible through your own worldview, as do I, as does everybody else, and a lot of what you find in the Bible is stuff you find because it's what you started out looking for."

In other words, you're telling me, "But you could be wrong, did you know that?". Once more, you came here to tell us this? And since you are admittedly sick of the same disease ("as do I") how would adopting your position deliver us from this danger of being wrong?

"I think you filter your reading of the Bible through your own worldview, as do I, as does everybody else, and a lot of what you find in the Bible is stuff you find because it's what you started out looking for. You hate government social programs so you find biblical authority against them, just as the Christian socialists find biblical support for them."

And that's why we should join the Christian socialists? This is one of the oddest but strongest arguments I have ever heard for becoming a Christian socialist. Which isn't saying much about the strength of such arguments, I know, but still. And yes, I know you were not arguing for Christian socialism at all. Of course not. But yours is the really lazy argument of the really lazy man who is determined to go out and save the world but can't really rise up from the sofa, and so he waves his index finger ominously.

"And I'm an old man who has lived long enough to see the danger in selectivly biblicizing one's personal biases."

Cheer up, Jabe, I have good news for you. The one thing that this discussion has served to establish is that you haven't lived long enough yet. With much respect for your age, and a sincere prayer that God bless you and your family. The way you selectively biblicize your personal biases is noteworthy, since although we have been waiting for days that you prove your points from Scripture, or at least that you biblicize for our convenience your personal biases, you have refrained from mentioning the Bible except in order to sneer at it, and you keep on giving us only those personal biases of yours that you haven't biblicized yet. Since we hear only your pristine, unadulterated personal biases, not only are you in practice undistinguishable from an unbeliever, but I see no reason why we should still be paying any attention to anything you are saying. Except that it's good entertainment. Now where's my popcorn?

"And maybe, just maybe, biblicizing one's biases is only possible in the first place because the Bible wasn't intended to be the final word anyway; sola scriptura is a fairly recent arrival in church history."

So maybe, just maybe, out of the window goes sola scriptura. Any other theological requirements you would like to remind to the countless multitudes of Blog and Mablog readers who no doubt are now suddenly attracted by your position, and on the verge of embracing it?

"As far as applying your premises to the real world, since we're on the subject of Obama nation building, have you seriously thought through the massive human suffering that would ensue if all those social programs you despise actually were to shut down?"

Mmm. Okay, that's reasonable. Tell you what, I grant you this point. So let's say I would give all those bureaucrats two months to clean their desks and send their CVs before firing them. And I promise not even one of them will be hanged.
Charles Long  Thursday, April 22, 2010 4:59 pm
Jabe,

You say building cities and organizing and such is "in our nature." "We just do those things" you say. Two responses:

1) We do those things now. But, given the atheistic presumption, we have not always done those things; and, assuming that we are not so myopic and egocentric as to thing the evolutionary process ends with us, we most likely will not continue to do those things. And there's nothing wrong with simply embracing the next step in the evolutionary process... right?

2) Yes, we build cities. We also steal other peoples' cities. We also blow them up. And rape, and murder, and steal, lie, cheat, and play Christmas music before thanksgiving. We just do those things. What rational explanation can you give for embracing half the we-dos and rejecting the other half of them?
Jabe  Thursday, April 22, 2010 6:11 pm
Charles, if we live long enough I'm sure we will embrace the next evolutionary step, whatever it turns out to be.

As to your second question, it's because of evolutionary psychology. Once upon a time, loyalty to one's group -- family, religious, local civil authority -- and hostility to everyone else was an evolutionary asset, as was racism. They no longer are, but because we evolved at a time when they were assets, the behavior still lingers. And that's why Alexander the Great saw no conflict between being what he considerd a decent human being while launching wars of aggression against everyone else in sight -- he was acting in the interest of his group at the expense of everybody else's group. The Taliban does the same thing. So do chimpanzees.

As we've progressed, we've come to realize that there is only one group -- us, the human race -- and everyone is better off cooperating rather than fighting. Even if you don't believe in ethics or morality, from a purely utilitarian standpoint we're still better off cooperating rather than fighting. Unfortunately, you're not going to eradicate a million years of evolutionary psychology in a brief period of time.
Jabe  Thursday, April 22, 2010 6:00 pm
Gianni, you misapprehend my burden of proof. I could, if I had the time and inclination, write a dissertation on what is Christian thought, both foundationally and in practice. I haven't done so, and I'm not going to, because it's well beyond the scope of this thread. As it relates to this thread, my position, in its entirety, is that Wilson is wrong about there only being two alternative views of authority.

Think of it this way: If I arrive home to find that someone has thrown a rock through my window, and my neighbor tells me that UFO aliens did it, I don't have to know who actually did do it to know that he's probably wrong. Likewise, I don't have to write a treatise on what Chrstian thought actually is to tell you that your view of it is much too cramped. The fact that it doesn't conform to reality tells me everything I need to know, even if I didn't know anything else about the subject.
Jane Dunsworth  Thursday, April 22, 2010 6:37 pm
Jabe, all of that seems irrelevant to the question of whether there are innate moral standards that can be derived. Sure, there's a hue and cry over Tianmen. But there are still plenty of people who think it was not such a bad thing, or wouldn't think a parallel manifestation in their own situation was such a bad thing, "if necessary." Most of them don't live in the U.S., or western Europe, or Singapore or Japan -- but a lot of them live in places like China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, the horn of Africa, Central Asia.....

Whether or not social evolution could be posited as a means of "catching up" so that everyone eventually "evolves" to something more resembling the standard of behavior that the Bible maintained all along, the very existence of these moral "laggard" societies indicates that the kind of public morality that you and I take for granted, and want to live around, isn't common to the human experience. It's not wholly exceptional, but it's clearly a mixed bag. I don't think there's any way to privilege what we would consider "decent" public morality as being "normal" as compared to "savage" or "oppressive" behavior, in light of observing the run of human behavior.
Derrick  Thursday, April 22, 2010 6:59 pm
“No, Derrick, I haven't lost sight of anything. The original question, way back when this thread started, was whether there was any basis for governmental authority in a godless universe. And as I said way back when, in fact there is: It derives its authority from the consent of the governed, just like the Declaration of Independence and Rousseau said.”

This seems more than a little twilight zoneish. I’ve addressed your claims at a number of levels. I’ve refuted the philosophical assumptions that, even when pointed out, seem to escape you. But ignoring them doesn’t make them true. You can’t avoid “doing” philosophy; you either do it well or poorly. You have been doing it very poorly, and I have addressed that poor performance. I have also shown in detail (beginning in the previous post) why all you have, at best, is description of physical reality. You haven’t even begun to show that you understand the concepts of authority and ethics let alone demonstrated how these concepts follow from a description of physical reality. And I have also addressed some specific claims that you seem to think are important (e.g., the sloppy collectivization of “human nature”). And at several points, you seemed pretty close to admitting the obvious: the best you can do is to say that phenomenon X happens because that’s how phenomenon X works.

Yet now, you’ve simply ignored everything and restated your original and refuted claim as if that demonstrates something. But pointing out one tiny example from the annals of history where a few evolving, erect bags of water-soaked neurochemicals did something according to their changing and conflicted natures hardly comes close to demonstrating any kind of authority at all. You would have produced no bigger a non sequitur if you’d said that authority is derived from the drag coefficient of certain homo-sapiens’ faces. At least Cd is a little more stable than human desires.


“You then launched into a whole series of mostly irrelevant navel-gazing designed to ignore the metaphysical primary that reality exists. Since that's a metaphysical primary, it is impossible to go back further. Your questions all boil down to: Why is reality what it is? However, the only germane question is: What is reality?”

Jabe, it’s been pretty clear that you should have declined to continue quite a few posts ago. This is just not a conversation you are prepared for. At the very least, you should have taken my pacific advice and slowed way down. There is hardly any shame with saying, “Maybe I’ve misunderstood where you guys are coming from and what you are arguing for so could you help me with these questions?” On the contrary, this would have been quite wise. But instead, you have been in debate mode the whole time and, perhaps as a consequence, you have made a number of sloppy and weird mistakes. And it started pretty much right at the beginning when you seriously misread the Pastor in the previous post. Why do you continue like this? The wise man listens long before he speaks, and as a consequence, he doesn’t charge into a new arena with guns ever blazing only to stumble all over the place.

You seem determined to convince us that you are a liberal fundamentalist. I’ve seen this behavior in plenty of fundamentalists over the years. I’ve seen them get in over their heads and it was clear to everyone but themselves that they were not prepared. But it didn’t matter because they simply blew off everything that didn’t register on their grid. Anything that questioned or rose above the level of naïve, “common sense” empiricism was simply irrelevant. Their ability to self-analyze was skin deep and they were miles away from being epistemologically self-conscious. And instead of slowing down and trying to have a conversation (as opposed to a debate), they plowed ahead with no interest in asking some basic questions. It’s like they weren’t even curious. And so time and time again, they made some really weird mistakes – mistakes that made others wonder what else was going on that could explain such large, strange errors. But none of this mattered because they just kept on debating, begging the question, and recycling already refuted claims. The extent to which this scenario fits what you’ve done here is large. At the very least, I would suggest that this should concern you.
TBush  - re:  Friday, April 23, 2010 4:29 am
Jabe wrote:
Charles, if we live long enough I'm sure we will embrace the next evolutionary step, whatever it turns out to be.


Wait for it...wait for it... here it comes...wait for it...
Gianni  Friday, April 23, 2010 12:44 pm

Jabe, two things, no, three, have emerged during this discussion.

The first is the fact that the things you should say are "well beyond the scope of this thread", whereas the things that you shouldn't say, enigmatically, aren't. Whatever. The second thing that stands out is that you really can't distinguish an obligation from a carrot, let alone from the reason or the grounds for a given behavior, or from a matter of fact. You were outraged when I first threw the Carrot Bomb, but then you mysteriously decided to do whatever it takes in order to prove I was right. I don't understand the logic involved, but it probably has something to do with Alexander the Great, or with Fred the Goat, or (nothing will surprise me anymore) with both -- an option which I am trying not to visualize but which may well be suggestive of our next evolutionary step in our rocky but ultimately triumphal march toward a more enlightened ethical system. And who knows, perhaps that's the way goats will eventually replace mankind as the main actors in God's majestic plan for making some use or another of all these interminable eons of time, which are so long that a theistic evolutionist might be excused for thinking that even someone like Jehovah, with all due respect, may run out of ideas, unless of course He has run out of them already -- possibly when, after an excruciatingly long, slow and completely uneventful stretch of time (which would later inspire generations of French movie makers), on the very day that the Archaeozoic era finally ended, He realized that the Paleozoic era was scheduled to start within five minutes. In any case I understand that goats have waited long enough, and whatever works in hastening their rise to prominence, even if it involves making paper dolls out of the pages of Leviticus, should be welcomed by all evolutionists and other enemies of sola scriptura as a perfectly fine and appropriate way to kill time while this era moves on with its slow, meandering plot and before the next geological era begins. If this prospect about goats seems unlikely, no scholar or pundit gave much credit to the first manlike creature either, at the time, when it crawled out of the slime, when jurisprudence was still in its prime, and murder wasn't yet a crime, and clean consciences weren't worth a dime.

As for the third thing, Jabe, next time you try to appear well versed in Van Til, please make some effort to go beyond the "Van Til is wrong since 2 + 2 isn't equal to 6" objection, and the eerily irrelevant syllogism that if Rushdoony and Bahnsen had been writing when you were a child, you would have been raised on them. Speak to us in such a way that it’s clear that you see through him and through us. All you have done this time has been to make us cringe at your epistemological naivety. For someone well versed in Van Til, this can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to win an argument by causing profound mental or even physical distress in the opponent, desperate as that may sound to people unaware of the latest advances in apologetic strategies. Look at Derrick. Don't you feel guilty for the way he has been banging his head on the wall for several days now? Didn't you say you're against policies that lead to massive human suffering?

John Galt  - A Parable  Thursday, May 06, 2010 4:08 pm
There once was a king. Let’s call him Ahab. Ahab was very desirous to own the vineyard of one of his subjects so that he could grow his prized tomatoes (the soil was just right). Let’s call this subject Naboth. The vineyard was the only one close to the king’s castle. Now Ahab was a wicked king. But even in his wickedness he knew that he could not just steal the vineyard, so he offered Naboth a price.

Naboth, being very attached to his vineyard for a variety of reasons, declined the offer. Ahab was very sad about the refusal and decided to pout about it. His wife, let’s call her Jezbel, was even more wicked than her husband. She proposed a scheme which end was her husband’s possession of the prized vineyard.

“My dear”, Jezebel said to Ahab, “there are many children in your kingdom who want to learn to dance and sing in the temples we have erected to the gods of the foreign nations around us. But alas, they have no one to teach them the songs and dances. The foreign gods’ anger burns against such a waste of potential talent!”

“You shall levy a tax on vineyards within 1 mile of our castle. You shall further inform the community of the purpose of the tax – to teach the children to sing and dance to the foreign gods. The children and their parents will be delighted! Naboth, being otherwise a poor man, will not be able to pay the tax. Your communications ministers will call Naboth a ‘tax cheat’ and the people will demand he be thrown off his vineyard.”

“You will, with a sad countenance, announce that poor Naboth’s vineyard will have to be sold at auction to pay his tax. You, my dear, will be the only bidder. After all, the law is the law. Naboth’s own God instructs him to be submissive to the ‘governing authorities’! He can’t even protest! No one in the community will come to his aid because of their desire to please the foreign gods with their dancing and singing. You will have your vineyard. Now stop pouting. The children are waiting.”

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