Skip to main content

Home/ Apologia/ Contents contributed and discussions participated by Jeffery Reid

Contents contributed and discussions participated by Jeffery Reid

Simple Middle Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics
Jeffery Reid

The Dawkins Confusion - Books & Culture - 1 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...1.21.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 13 Sep 07 - Cached
  • religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 13 Sep 07
       
      Tell that to Salman Rushdi!
  • First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 13 Sep 07
       
      So, because a couple of early thinkers concluded that God is simple, therefore God is simple? So this is Christianity's foremost apologist in action, huh? Wow... Does he consider, I wonder, that other things these same thinkers considered simple then are now generally regarded as complex? What did they think of DNA, of the human circulatory system, of how plants grow, on the effect of sunlight on chlorophyll?
  • More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 13 Sep 07
       
      Wow.... I'm just astonished that this kind of muddle-headed playing of logic games passes as philosophy. I always had a rather good view of philosophers. I guess I need to read more. "but of course, God is a spirit"? What? Huh? What about Jesus being the embodiment of God? What about the Holy trinity? Why would god be separated into God, The Holy Spirit and Jesus if God were ONLY a spirit? What about Man being cast in God's image? Is Alvin a spirit? He may believe he HAS a spirit... Utter nonsense
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 13 Sep 07
       
      OMFG! So again... Sure, IF you START with the assumption that "God is necessary" Dawkins owes you an explanation for why God is not necessary. Hell, if you start with the assumption that God is a potato bug, then Dawkins owes you that as well... IF HE IS ONLY TRYING TO DISPROVE GOD. However, if he is looking at observable data and formulating a theory that BEST explains what he is able to observe, then he owes you no such thing.
  • If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable—a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs—including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; natural- ism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...122-52.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07 - Cached
  • If our morality evolved, then that means our morality changes. If evolution isn't done yet (and why should it be?), then that means our morality is involved in this on-going flux as well. And that means that everything we consider to be "moral" is really up for grabs. Our "vague yet grand conception of human rights" might flat disappear just like our gills did.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      It is up for grabs and all one need do is look back a few years in our history to prove it. Homosexuals were imprisoned blacks were segregrated These were all moral issues. Christian doctrine supported these repressions. Today, everything has changed.
  • A fixed standard, grounded in the character of God, allows us to define evil
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      What is this "fixed standard"? Brad, can you illustrate this for me?
  • I noted from your book that you are a baptized Christian, so I want to conclude by calling and inviting you back to the terms of that baptism. Everyone who has been baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is carrying in their person the standing obligations of repentance, belief, and continued discipleship.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      What? So a babbling infant has already entered into a contract with God whether they like it or not? More raving lunacy...
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...121-52.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07 - Cached
  • What I want to know (still) is what warrant you have for calling some behaviors "good" and others "wicked." If both are innate, what distinguishes them? What could be wrong with just flipping a coin?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Easily addressed: A and B are at war A kills B Troops A calls the action "good" B calls the action "wicked" They are both correct. Such is the reality of human morality.
  • I reply that I would rather have my God and the problem of evil than your no God and "Evil? No problem!"
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Again, the same tired crap. Atheists don't believe "evil, no problem!" We recognize that good and bad depend on your point of view. That the standard isn't fixed and can't be fixed.
  • Actually, I believe I can present evidence for what I know. But evidence comes to us like food, and that is why we say grace over it. And we are supposed to eat it, not push it around on the plate—and if we don't give thanks, it never tastes right. But here is some evidence for you, in no particular order. The engineering that went into ankles. The taste of beer. That Jesus rose from the dead on the third day, just like he said. A woman's neck. Bees fooling around in the flower bed. The ability of acorns to manufacture enormous oaks out of stuff they find in the air and dirt. Forgiveness of sin. Storms out of the North, the kind with lightning. Joyous laughter (diaphragm spasms to the atheistic materialist). The ocean at night with a full moon. Delta blues. The peacock that lives in my yard. Sunrise, in color. Baptizing babies. The pleasure of sneezing. Eye contact. Having your feet removed from the miry clay, and established forever on the rock. You may say none of this tastes right to you. But suppose you were to bow your head and say grace over all of it. Try it that way.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      So the evidence here is that he experiences what the mind experiences therefore God exists and had Jesus not died on the cross, none of this would have been possible. So, before Jesus, beer tasted like shit, a woman's neck was made or razor wire.... what the f#%k!
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...120-53.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07 - Cached
  • needlessly convoluted
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Hitchens is now resorting to attacking his writing style... how lame.
  • clumsy observation
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Give the guy a break, Chris!
  • The first is that innate is not a synonym for authoritative. Why does anyone have to obey any particular prompting from within? And which internal prompting is in charge of sorting out all the other competing promptings? Why?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      This is excellent. Why do Christians desire God so? Why do you assume their is an authority there telling you what to do? Innate isn't an authority, it may be only reality. There are no pretty clothes for it to parade around in gathering devotion. Innate means "it's there" and offers no explanation as to why; none is needed. Yet, you theists beg for God. You so want there to be God behind everything to give it meaning. You can't seem to accept that there isn't any meaning in the sense you so desire. So, rather than just accepting the empty universe for what it is, you invent fantastic explanations to give false comfort.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Second, the tangled skein of innate and conflicting moralities found within the billions of humans alive today also has to be sorted out and systematized. Why do you get to do it and then come around and tell us how we must behave? Who died and left you king?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Wrong. Atheists aren't saying that. No one wants to be king. We want to simply acknowledge that the religious models don't hold up under any scrutiny. No one is telling you how to behave. We're simply saying that the reasons behind your current behavior make no sense and are HARMFUL to millions of others. Your beliefs HURT people whether by denying them liberty or outright killing them.
  • And third, according to you, this innate morality of ours is found in a creature (mankind) that is a distant blood cousin of various bacteria, aquatic mammals, and colorful birds in the jungle. Your entire worldview has evolution as a key foundation stone, and evolution means nothing if not change. You believe that virtually every species has morphed out of another one. And when we change, as we must, all our innate morality changes with us, right? We have distant cousins where the mothers ate their young. Was that innate for them? Did they evolve out of it because it was evil for them to be doing that?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      Yes. And even other religious types agree that life is about change. You can't ignore it. You already tacitly accept it every time you relegate another Biblical story or teaching from fact to allegory, from law to myth. There is no evil. Evil is only understood through the eyes of a victim of someone else's lethal intent.
  • If Christianity is bad for the world, atheists can't consistently point this out, having no fixed way of defining "bad."
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      But we do have a way to define bad. Bad is what does others harm in the eyes of a society. And the definition of bad changes depending on a) what side you are on in a given argument b) your education and ability to experience empathy and c) how the proposed actions affect you personally.
  • Jesus Christ is good for the world because he came as the life of the world. You point out, rightly, that loving our neighbor as we love ourselves is impossible for us, completely out of our reach. But you take this inability as a state of nature (which the commandment offends), while the Christian takes it as a state of death (which life offers to transform). Our complete inability to do what is right does not erase our obligation to do what is right. This is why the Bible describes the unbeliever as a slave to sin or one who is in a state of death. The point of each illustration is the utter and complete inability to do right. We were dead in our transgressions and sins, the apostle Paul tells us. So the death and resurrection of Christ are not presented by the gospel as medicine for everyone in the hospital, but rather as resurrection life in a cemetery.The way of the world is to abide in an ongoing state of death—when it comes to selfishness, grasping, treachery, lust, hypocrisy, pride, and insolence, we consistently run a surplus. But in the death of Jesus that way of death was gloriously put to death. This is why Jesus said that when he was lifted up on the cross, he would draw all men to himself. In the kindness of God, the Cross is an object of inexorable fascination to us. When men and women look to him in his death, they come to life in his resurrection. And that is good for the world.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 07 Sep 07
       
      This just sounds like ravings... And, it reminds me of reading The Golden Bough and learning about all the crazy stuff people have believed throughout history.
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...119-12.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07 - Cached
  • So who cares?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      Humans care... Caring does not require God
  • Why should any of us care about the effeminate judgments of history? Should the propagators of these "horrors" have cared? There is no God, right? Because there is no God, this means that—you know—genocides just happen, like earthquakes and eclipses. It is all matter in motion, and these things happen.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      Brad, He makes the same mistake you do. This leap to the conclusion that without God's judgment, humans are only left to uncaring anarchy. This is simply bunk. Humans do care about these matters since they impact the survival of ourselves. Morals exist to preserve the individuals in society. Dawkins might say they exist to faciliate the transfer of genetic material. But "good" and "bad" have nothing to do with it outside of the ability of good and bad to exist as cues to survival.... this thing is "bad" means, this thing challenges my survival. Perhaps it's simply your fear of your own thoughts and impulses that lead you to such conclusions. But science discovered that humans have a built-in governor, the mind. We don't really need another...
  • Many of them were actually inspired by the idea that since God is exhaustively sovereign, and because man is a sinner, it follows that all earthly power must be limited and bounded. The idea of checks and balances came from a worldview that you dismiss as inherently totalitarian. Why did those societies where this kind of theology predominated produce, as a direct result, our institutions of civil liberty
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      I think this is just wrong. True that any European came from a mostly Christian culture. But England was already watering down the choking doctrine of the one true Church. Jefferson and Adams were themselves even more removed from a Christian POV. The separation of Church and State (fundamental to our Constitution) was a product of their ethos and politics and their direct experiences of church injustice.
Jeffery Reid

"Is Christianity Good for the World?" | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ... - 0 views

www.christianitytoday.com/...119-42.0.html

shared by Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07 - Cached
  • The Christian faith certainly condemns hypocrisy as such, but because there is a fixed standard, this makes it possible for sinners to fail to meet it or for flaming hypocrites to pretend that they are meeting it when they have no intention of doing so.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      What is this "fixed standard"? Is it the same one that enabled the Church to launch the Crusades? Or, is it the one that let the Church launch the Inquisition? Or, is the same one that enabled people to keep slaves? Or, is the same one that exhorted believers to kill non-believers? Claiming that Christianity offers a fixed standard is just plain ignorant.
  • When another atheist makes different ethical choices than you do (as Stalin and Mao certainly did), is there an overarching common standard for all atheists that you are obeying and which they are not obeying?
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 31 Aug 07
       
      Yes. There is a standard, but like science, it changes with fashion, modernity, discovery and politics. Just like the Christian standard changes, ethic is subject to evolution. The difference is that we admit the change while Christianity obfuscates it in doctrine.
Jeffery Reid

Theology Today - Vol 50, No. 2 - July 1993 - ARTICLE - Not The Way It's S'pposed to Be:... - 0 views

theologytoday.ptsem.edu/...v50-2-article2.htm

shared by Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07 - Cached
  • Moreover, whether or not they believe in evolutionary naturalism, people who think of human beings as their own centers and lawgivers find the whole idea of utter dependence on a superior quite galling. After all, the proposal that we ought to worship someone who is better than we are, that we ought to study this person's will and then bend our lives to it, that we ought to confess our sins to this same person and beg forgiveness for them, meanwhile pinning our hopes on a gracious response-all this sounds humiliatingly undemocratic.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      This is simply incorrect. Naturalists believe that "society" drives these and that we are all dependent on society explicitly or implicitly
  • pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust)
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      Psychology knows that these are present in all humans but to differing degrees. Trying to avoid them is hopeless. And fearing their presence is sad and wastes human effort
  • culpable in the eyes of God.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      Wrong. Sin is as susceptible to mores as crime. A simple read of the old testament (and new) confirms this. How many sins are listed there that have no relevance in today's society? Laws on slavery, treatment of children, treatment of non-believers. Has this guy actually read the Bible lately?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Take the case of a white boy raised in a family of racists in Mississippi in the 1850s.
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      Or, replace that with a Christian who was born to a Christian family and has no real choice in the matter.
  • absorb racism from his environment
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      My GOD!!! What about the racism in the Bible sactioned by God? What about Exodus with God having the Israelites killing tribes ONLY because of their race? Have you read the Bible, dude?
  • Biblically instructed Christians
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      When did this happen? The Bible says NOTHING about this. The Bible instructs on racism and slavery. Is this guy a complete idiot?
  • pains God has taken to defeat sin and its wages
    • Jeffery Reid
      Jeffery Reid on 15 Aug 07
       
      Utter nonsense. God instructs His people to do commit mass acts of violence shedding blood everywhere they go in the Old Testament. Jesus says the Old Testament is still the law...
  • center of the Christian Bible
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20▼ items per page