Stopped by the blog of Christian apologist Victor Reppert today and saw two things I couldn't help but comment on.
The first is alleged Scientific evidence for supernaturalism. The link is down as I type this, but it cites two studies as devestating to naturalism. The first had a bunch of nuns remember a religious experience and an experience involving a friend while their brains were being scanned. The scans came up different, supposedly proving that religion is not a matter of emotion. Next week: scientists decide fear is not an emotion when scans of scared brains turn up different than scans of brains in other emotional experiences.
The other experiment is one that discovered that people would not want to buy a sweatshirt if they believed it had been owned by a mass murderer. This shows that people treat evil as some force external to the world or some such, therefore that must be how things are. Let's break this argument down:
1) People act as if evil is a force external to the world.
2) If people act like something's true, it must be true.
3) Evil is a force external to the world.
Premise 2 is, shall we say, debatable. It would tend to suggest that homeopathy works, that not changing your clothes will help you play baseball, and that countless Muslim terrorists are currently having orgies with 72-woman squads.
Wow... having read semi-competent Christian apologists, I've come to find arguments this bad insulting.
The other post is titled Mormon epistemology, which simply links to a Mormon website and declares that it "speaks for itself." I wish these things did speak for themselves. If they did, people like Michael Martin and myself could simply tell people to read William Lane Craig's writings and they'd realize Christianity is bogus.
2 comments:
What the "evidence for the supernatural" shows is not that naturalism is false but that "religion" is written pretty deeply into human nature. If atheists set themselves as a goal the eradication of the religious "mind virus," this is going to be a prove rather difficult. Even Colson didn't say it proved religious faith.
...I don't see your point. Generally, when I hear "evidence for X," I take it to mean "evidence for X" and not "evidence that people are predisposed to believe in X." The statement "'religion' is written pretty deeply into human nature" is not only something that many atheists could accept, some have argued for it at length. Nor do I doubt that religion in some form will always be with us, though the erradication of fundamentalism seems feasible enough to me.
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