TODAY'S RADIO SHOW

Today we will be talking with Atheist leader Edwin Kagin (see previous post). Some articles we may be referencing:

Science, fraud trigger a decline in atheism - Washington Times
Ungodly fun - St. Paul Pioneer Press
Battle on teaching evolution sharpens -  Washington Post
The Twilight of Atheism - Christianity Today

Comments

[Len]

I am listenting via internet from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

In regard to god and other supernatural assertions, anything supernatural is "above" or "beyond" the restrictions imposed by natural law.

God falls beyond the scope of man's comprehension. The nature of god is unknown and unknowable. God by definition is that which man cannot understand.

To exist beynd natural law means to exist beyond knowledge. If a god is a natural being and is/her/its/their actions can be explained in natural terms,then he is knowable. If it can be known it cannot be supernatural.

"Supernatural" tells us what a god is not. It does not tell us what a god is. If a god is unknowable, what characteristics can we use to recognize when we run
across one?

Natural existence is a redundancy. Things that exist are natural. If something is supernatural, how do we know it exists?

On Intelligent Design--it is religion. It is not science. It does not belong in a science class. There is no scientific theory of ID.

[Don]

Thanks for listening and for taking the time to write, Len. I appreciate it.

I see no reason to accept your epistemology. You say "To exist beyond natural law means to exist beyond knowledge." What is the basis for this? Also, you arbitrarily define "God" and "supernatural" in a way I see no reason to accept. Why does "God" have to be unknowable. It seems like you are just presupposing these assertions - taking them on blind faith. Can you give me a good reason why I should accept that only matter is knowable and understandable?

Don

[Allen]

Dear Mr. Johnson,

I very much enjoyed your interview with Edwin Kagin, and I appreciate your willingness to engage in conversation on such thorny problems as the existence of God.

At one point in your program, you asked Mr. Kagin if he agreed with the idea that some phenomena in nature are the result of intelligence. I think Mr. Kagin’s answer was less than clear—let me try to explain my take on it.

The short answer is that there are many examples of intelligent design in nature, but not necessarily of nature. Take, for example, the ant hill. Its tunnels and chambers are not the result of running water or some kind of defect in the soil; they are actively and purposefully excavated, grain by grain, by the ants themselves. This process has been documented by hundreds if not thousands of people in print, photographs, motion-picture film, and video. The same is true for bird nests, spider webs, beaver dams, and so on. These demonstrate intelligent design in nature.

In particular, you asked Mr. Kagin if it was more reasonable to believe that Mt. Rushmore was created by some kind of intelligence or the random forces of nature. Mr. Kagin’s answer could have been, and mine is, that it is obviously the product of intelligence. As with ant hills, there is hard evidence detailing its designer and construction. With some simple research, one can find the actual blueprints of the monument, the names of the designer and those who worked on in it, photographs of the sculpting in various stages, the eyewitness accounts of presidents and other credible people, and so on. The world is filled with things that have been created by humans, from cities to satellites, from Walmart to watches. These are also examples of intelligent design in nature.

It is the watch in particular which William Paley employs in his famous proof of the existence of God. In Natural Theology, he essentially argues that just as a watch with its intricate parts proves a watchmaker, so the complexity of biological systems, the human eye for example, demonstrates the existence of a supernatural designer. Paley’s argument fails, I believe, for three main reasons:

1) He wrongly seeks to prove the design of nature through examples of design in nature. In other words, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all complex things require a designer because certain ones do;

2) Unlike an ant hill or a watch, we have no direct evidence of Paley’s supernatural designer and how it constructed the eye, and is as such an appeal to ignorance; and

3) In contrast to bird nests and Mt. Rushmore, the human eye can be explained as the product of an unconscious process. One can trace its development in the fossil record, in various forms and stages of complexity. While one could assert, as the Catholic Church does, that the evolution of the human eye was directed by God, evolutionary theory explains the human eye very well without appealing to the supernatural.

Thanks again for your interesting show.

Yours sincerely,

Allen Nuti

Atheism “Expert” at www.allexperts.com

[Dan]

I enjoyed listening to yesterday’s show and I thought that you handled Edwin Kigan very well. He clearly struggles with some basic issue identification that is essential in any meaningful discussion. In the end, I think you identified his issue, which is that he adheres to his own view of dogmatic theology (a-theology, that is) that dismisses evidence and facts in reaching its conclusion. It appears to me that his basic premise is that anything that is invisible is not falsifiable, as you identified, and he thinks that it therefore cannot be the basis of rational thought. But as you were telling him, there are some very good, rational reasons to believe that God, although invisible, exists. He clings to his presupposition and you both became knotted as a result.

The couple of points I was going to raise related to the historicity of Jesus. As you identified, it is indeed a fringe position to believe that there was no historical Jesus. Habermas states that there is no serious scholar of history that denies that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, thereby and necessarily implying that he was a real man. I heard a debate between Craig and an Islamic philosopher in which (for obvious reasons) the crucifiction was a major issue. Craig challenged the philosopher to name one historical scholar of any reputation that did not hold to the view that Jesus was crucified; his challenged went unrequited. The reason why the crucifiction story is so hard to refute is (1) Tacitus mentions it (which is the “scandals” of the day – Tacitus being one of the best Roman historians, far more reliable than Josephus or Seutonious (sp?)), (2) the Jews attested to it in a number of sources, and (3) there is an amazing amount of historical evidence that demands some explanation at some level, and not all of it is Christian, and it is extremely hard to explain away if not even the crucifiction is considered a real, historical event. If you talk with him again, I would lay out all of this and then challenge him to produce an explanation as to why he does not think that the historical fact that Jesus was crucified is a close-to-irrefutable historical fact, which is the view of every serious scholar of every stripe and kind.

Second, and I know that this was the point you were trying to make but he just would not let you have word in edge-wise, the issue of whether Jesus rose from the dead is a discrete historical question that can and must be separated from the religious views connected with it. It either happened historically or it did not. He states that extraordinary claims required extraordinary evidence. But if you detail the several facts (Habermas gives 12, Craig gives 3 major facts) that can be attested and the vast majority of scholarship of every background does not dispute, there is not rational explanation of those facts aside from the resurrection hypothesis. I heard a debate between Habermas and Anthony Flew in which Flew acknowledged that he cannot offer what he believes is impossible to offer which is a purely naturalistic explanation of the events of 2,000 years ago. Two points are associated with this. First, if the historical evidence does not permit purely naturalistic explanations, then that in my book is pretty extraordinary. But, second, in the end, the extraordinary claim-extraordinary evidence is itself a claim that must be proven. Where does that come from and what is the intellectual basis that supports it? It is made up, fabricated for the purposes of those who wish to oppose the resurrection. In the end, all we can do is line up the historical evidence and determine what we can validly infer. Under that analysis, the resurrection hypothesis is the only one that survives as a permissible inference.

The last comment I would make is that you should also challenge him, the next time you talk to him, on the Kalam Cosmological argument. With the extraordinary developments in the big-bang theory, the evidence that God must exist is becoming stronger and stronger such that one cannot rationally dispute it. But in my view, Edwin is not being rational.

I enjoyed it – keep up the good work.

Dan