Results for the Prosblogion survey

You can see them here. Pretty neat stuff. If I can make a quick criticism though- I'd have to question why Philosophy of Religion is so disproportionally represented in the survey. Sorry, but 33.8 percent of Philosopher's do not practice philosophy of Religion.  Furthermore, I am certain that 40.5% of Philosophers are not Theists. This is understandable, since this survey merely to get a rough approximation. Plus, it couldn't have been easy to get 802 people to do participate in it. What I don't understand, however, is why the author chose to focus on the lack of female Philosophers and not on sampling issues. How many Philosophers of science did she interview, or philosophers of metaphysics? Or, for that matter, cognitive scientists? What if the majority of non-philosophers of religion that participated in this survey were ones that sympathised for religious arguments? Plus, not to be rude, by why was a field as useless as history of Philosophy even considered? Still, I feel as though the results were interesting.

The least surprising outcome would probably be how Theist and Atheist philosophers viewed the problem of evil. I mean, has any other philosophical argument caused so many people to change their minds on God? It deserves its place as the highest rated argument overall. Furthermore, I cannot say I am surprised by the overall low ratings given to the arguments from beauty. Why they even bothered mentioning it here was beyond me. A better argument, in my eyes, was the argument from fine tuning- which they sloppily lopped together with intelligent design arguments as the "argument for design". I say this since I find the former arguments much more persuasive than the latter. I am most surprised, however, at the ratings Theist philosophers gave to the argument from miracles. I mean really, 2.82? Theists consider the argument from miracles better than the argument from inconsistent revelations and the argument from lack of evidence? The argument from miracles isn't a philosophical argument. And speaking of the argument from inconsistent revelations, why did it score lowest? If anything, I thought it would be second highest. Are Christians really that convinced that Satan exists, or that God will do miracles for some people and let them burn in hell forever?

I look forward to reading more on this issue now since I know about it.

Bayes Theorem and the Resurrection of Jesus

It seems like every few years somebody tries to make a Bayesian argument for the existence of God. Some of them argue for the divinity of Jesus, and some for other Philosophical arguments, like the argument from fine tuning. Richard Swinburne has made many of these arguments, and has now made a Bayesian argument for the Resurrection. So what, is he gonna prove that the odds the resurrection occurred are astonishingly high, like perhaps, Tim and Lydia's estimate of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1?

Now, as I have repeatedly said, I am not a philosopher by anyones standards. I can, however, check out his empirical claims, and see if they have merit. After all, a Bayesian argument is only as good as the facts plugged into it, right? For example, in the Mcgrew's essay, they attack the Hallucination hypothesis since there were too many to have occurred naturally. They also attack it because the hallucinations would have to have lasted for very long periods of time. The problem, however, is that this is only true of you accept that the details of the Gospel accounts are accurate, which they do. If you believe that the appearance stories are legendary, than all of a sudden these criticisms disappear. Furthermore, if you actually read the current information of bereavement hallucinations, you'd find that it is not at all improbable that, after Jesus' death, many people claimed to have seen him alive. I have argued this elsewhere, so I will not repeat myself.

So, I will have to pick up his book and see if he challenges naturalistic alternatives like the Mcgrew's do. From what little I've read on Amazon, the book mainly deals with Jesus' divinity, so I doubt there will be much of an attack against the hallucination hypothesis.

Interesting survey on Prosblogion

I know I rarely discuss philosophy, but this is too interesting to pass up. I'll have to do a post discussing the results too- although I doubt they will be surprising. I mean, most Philosophers are atheists, remember? Still, it would be interesting to see just how many Theists still put stock in arguments for the existence of God.

The "New Christian" movement?

Prior to Sam Harris' "The end of Faith", nobody in there right mind would ever call an atheist an idiot purely on the basis of their atheism. The informed Theist would know full well that most philosophers and scientists were atheists. Usually Theists regarded atheism as an emotional rejection of God- not an intellectual one. However, recently a whole slew of Christian apologists (see here and here) have been going around declaring atheism both an emotional AND an intellectual defect! They claim that the existence of God is so obvious that one would have to consciously lie to themselves to avoid believing in him. So, how did such an attitude begin? Okay, I'll stop being coy- we all have a pretty good idea of what happened. The New Atheists came into the picture and made us all look dumb. Don't get me wrong- Dawkins is a brilliant scientist, and Dennett is popular in the Philosophy of Mind. But they aren't authorities in the History or Philosophy of Religion; and to put it bluntly, they put no effort into trying to be. They chant catch-phrases and ignore their critics.

So, how did Christians counter the new atheists? Well- they practically joined them! Apologists wrote books responding to the New Atheists- books which  were highly polemical apologetics with little substance (see here and here). Other, less informed Christians bought these books under the influence that Dawkins and co somehow represented the best in Atheistic thought. After all, why else would a Christian waste their money on a book debunking literally useless arguments? Anyways, I guess some of these ignorant Christians decided to "stand up" against the New Atheists, using their new books, filled with equally poor arguments and rhetoric, and as a result ended up starting a new movement- one I like to call "New Christianity". Philos71 and KabaneTheChristian from YouTube would be a great examples of these "New Christians". Of course, there have always been aggressive atheists like Bertrand Russell- but they lived way before the reign of Plantinga- during a time in which the non-existence of God was practically a fact. Now, I agree that this enlightenment attitude against religion that the New Atheists have espoused is both embarrassing and inappropriate- but honestly, does that give Christians the right to be just as rude in retaliation? Maybe we could figure out a way to critique the New Atheists without all the collateral damage?