Miracles and Talking Donkeys

Posted on May 17, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

Do you ever get the feeling, when you are talking to someone about Kant’s categorical imperative, that the other “person” is actually a tiny worm that you had put on a hook to go fishing?  And that suddenly you realize the worm is talking back to you, but not about Kant at all; instead it is saying: “AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!  This HURTS, you idiot…and you need to read some John Stuart Mill and get back to me!”

Nah, me neither.  But I do sometimes get the feeling that competing intuitions are inhibiting an argument; that sometimes things just seem different to two different people, and thus it’s hard to find common ground to argue on.

This week, I feel a little like that.  We’re going to continue my rebuttal of our guest atheist’s post (which, despite all I’m saying about it, I thought was excellent).  Specifically, I’m going to talk about the part of Grundy’s post that dealt with miracles.  And re-reading our discussion, I have to say that part of me wonders if maybe we are really just proverbial ships passing in the night; ships going to different places and never really meeting at all.

The other part of me wants to tear his post to tiny pieces. Guess which part wins?

Next week, I’ll spend some time addressing the many things in Grundy’s post that I agreed with.  (And yet, dear reader, it will have the same level of sarcastic ineptitude that you have come to expect from the Apologetic Professor).

We’ll start with Grundy’s comment and proceed to my response.

Grundy: What I can’t overlook is the miracles. There’s the splitting of the Red Sea, walking on water, resurrections, talking snakes and donkeys and shrubbery, water turns to wine and sometimes blood, the divine duplication of seafood and baked goods—I seriously don’t see how anyone can believe this and not be just as credulous reading tales of Dracula and King Arthur? The rotation of the earth stops at some point so Joshua can have more daylight to kill Amorites. It just stops. I don’t want to come off as insulting, but I see this as fantasy and I have a hard time understanding how other adults do not.

Apologetic Professor: Well, let me help you understand as best I can.  First of all, there is very little content in this argument.  You’ve mostly asserted by fiat that miracles don’t happen. Maybe in other small and insular circles, you can simply assert that miracles don’t happen and that gets you some applause and pats on the back; just like in some of my own small insular circles, I can say I believe in the Bible and that gets me some superficial praise.  But now you are entering the residence of such thinkers as St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and Newton and Kepler – and you’re going to need sterner stuff than that.

One of the problems with so much atheist (and Christian) argumentation is that there is no actual content to attack.  You simply state you do not believe in miracles. It’s like trying to argue with someone who does not believe in England and just repeats over and over again that “England isn’t real, I haven’t seen it, and no thinking person would believe in it.”

This medicine is the most preferred drug by many people because of their numerous benefits, including getting viagra in australia easy and convenient to buy drugs online on Pharmacy Online Drug Store over the internet. However, men with heart diseases are levitra cialis viagra advised to be careful while consuming these pills for your penis. The ditched drama queen created viagra canada overnight http://ronaldgreenwaldmd.com/pdfs/colleen-gallagher-i-am-back.pdf a vitriolic video and posted it on video hosting site You Tube. viagra shops in india Those who suffer from the following should consult their doctor before taking any medication: – Kidney problems- Previous stroke- High or low blood pressure- If you are allergic to Sildenafil Citrate do not go for this medicine at all. Well, I hate to disappoint, but plenty of thinking people do believe in both England and miracles.  To me, this statement from Grundy is no different than Christians who argue that the Bible is true because it says it’s true.  That may end up being accurate, but it’s still very poor intellectual fare.

The primary reason I believe in miracles is the one Jesus suggested in the Bible: “Believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”  I’ve followed his advice to seek and find, and I think the evidence points in favor of the miraculous.  I think I’ve seen miracles, and I think the best explanations for some historical events are miracles. Sometimes I wonder if it is only because naturalists rule out, up front, the possibility of miracles, that they deny some of the facts that might support these conclusions. Perhaps that is unfair; but, for the record, I’m not impressed by a method of discovering the truth about England that involves staying at home and denying its existence!

Now, in terms of actual argumentation, I can see two loose themes in Grundy’s statement. (1) The clearest argument stated here is that miracles don’t exist because they seem like violations of the natural order (e.g., “how can I believe the rotation of the earth would just stop?”).

That argument has the exact logical structure of saying “you should not believe in broccoli because it is a green vegetable.”  I mean, the exact same structure.  Of course miracles will seem…well, miraculous.  Of course they will seem like violations of the natural order – because that’s the definition of a miracle. It is a violation of the natural order.  So, yeah, they seem that way to me, too, and yet we are no further to actually answering the question of whether they happen.  So: Next argument.

(2) Your implied inductive reasoning suggests because some stories are legends, all these stories must be legends.  Fair enough – that’s certainly possible.  King Arthur is an excellent example as a starting point, in part because it illustrates a common problem with this sort of argument.

Some people think Arthur was based on a real king. I get that. It may or may not be true — those people could just as easily be based on stories like the Lord of the Rings. If Tolkien had lived in ancient Egypt, we might be talking about Gandalf instead of Osiris; if he had lived in ancient England, we might be talking about Aragorn instead of Arthur. But, right of the bat, there is a problem with the inductive conclusion that “therefore, Jesus is probably a legendary figure, too.” Jesus is different historically from those legendary people by leaps and bounds — they aren’t really comparable. Arthur MAY have been based on a real king; but we don’t even know what king it was, and scholars debate that issue. Jesus wasn’t BASED on anyone; he was a real person, the thing itself. So it’s reasonable to say “the stories about Jesus may have been exaggerated or even made up after the fact” — I respect that possibility. But I’m not sure about saying “Jesus himself was actually a hero of unknown origin from a different time period that got turned into a myth.” I don’t think that’s a very historically accurate picture of the state of things.

So that’s just a start.  It’s useful to establish, right up front, that some percentage of the “legends” people use in this sort of inductive argumentation (including both of the ones you use) are not really very good comparisons.  Therefore, when you say “how can I believe in Jesus’ miracles but not Merlin’s magic?” my initial response is, “for one thing, Jesus was clearly a real historical figure tied to a real historical time period in a real historical place, whereas Merlin is just a shadowy legend.”

That doesn’t get us directly to miracles, of course.  And I have no argument to “get” anyone to “miracles” from Go. I’ll leave the larger argument about Jesus’ resurrection aside in other and more capable hands than mine.  Rather, I’ll say this: I see no reason why the natural order we see must necessarily be the only order; most people at most times – including a decent percentage of the smartest people who have ever lived – have believed in the supernatural; at least some percentage of those same people report experiencing a miracle; therefore, it seems useful to at least consider the possibility that events in my own life and others that seem odd may be explained via miracle.  When I do so consider, I find that the vast majority of these events that seem “odd” are likely coincidences explained by chance or natural laws; but I still find a few that do not seem readily explained and seem clearly miraculous.  Independent of that, I also find inside of me a strong hope that the supernatural exists in some way – a love of mystical things – the occasional yearning for a better place – that coincides with this belief.

Of course, Hume may be right and these things may all ultimately be explained by coincidence, chance, exaggeration, lying, and the like.  I like Hume; I’m open to that; yet I’m not going to consent to it just because some folks assert by fiat that miracles don’t happen, or are uncomfortable with the idea of a talking donkey.  I see no reason to assume that they can’t, and therefore I feel fine using them as a possible explanatory mechanism.  When I do that, I find it highly probable that they have happened in my own life and in the lives of other people I know.

Posted in Christian Approach to Knowledge, Does God Exist? | 8 Comments

Are Theists Opposed to Science?

Posted on May 10, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

As a kid, I used to have this venting doll named Mr. Long-Legs.  When I was upset, I would take out my frustration by boxing Mr. Long-Legs into a state of doll oblivion. Bottom-line: If this were a Toy Story movie, the creepy music would start playing when I walked in the room.  (Woody: “Run, Mr. Long-Legs, run – Evil Luke’s coming!  There’s a snake in my boot! Buzz, stop pulling that string. We’re trying to do a movie here.”)

Now, in spite of appearances, I loved that doll.  But I discovered that, although I broke it with regularity, I could never figure out how to put it back together.  Ripping it apart was easy; patching it back together was beyond me.  I knew how to break a doll; but not to make one.

This past week, the Apologetic Professor was delighted to entertain a wonderful atheist blogger on our website, while I posted a guest piece on his blog. And one of the things this process has made totally salient to me is that it is far easier to rip up an argument into tiny pieces than it is to build a positive argument.  Every argument has a hole somewhere; there are no perfect arguments; human intellect is a glorious but imperfect instrument. A natural (and partially sad) consequence of this is that it is easier for us humans to tear down epistemological buildings than to build them.  (That is, unless the epistemological version of my Mom, who always patched up Mr. Long-Legs, comes walking through the door).

[The Apologetic Professor is proud to be the first blogger in recorded history to use the phrase “epistemological buildings.” We hope it catches on at parties and Billy Ray Cyrus concerts!]

So, if any of you want entertainment, you can go and watch my epistemological building get ripped down by some thoughtful atheists’ comments on Grundy’s blog.

Anyway, drawn as I am to things I am successful at for purely altruistic reasons, over the next few weeks I am not going to attempt to build anything constructive or positive.  Nay, good reader – I have tried and failed (like everyone else I know) at that.  Rather, I am instead going to do something I’m better at – I’m going to spend some time knocking down Grundy’s post on this blog.

To be fair, he’s doing the same thing to my post on his cite, which you can start here.

Now, before I start, I wanted to say how much I appreciate Grundy’s fair-minded approach to everything.  I disagree with him most of the time (and he with me), but I admire his thinking mind and seeking spirit.  The more I read his blog, the more like it – so if you want to read a thoughtful atheist, I’d highly recommend it (deityshmeity.com).

So, although I’m going to rebut some of what he said over the coming weeks in my usual cheeky and hyperbolic manner, I did want to publically acknowledge how much I appreciated the invitation to do this, and his fair-minded approach to the questions we are considering.

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Grundy: The tendency for theists to deny science is a product of their need to cling to the dogma that runs counter to the way things are, or at the very least, the way things appear.

Apologetic Professor: The tendency for theists to deny science?  Theists largely created science.  Why would we deny it?

The fact that theists basically created science could be a socio-historical accident, of course; but I don’t think it’s entirely a coincidence. (Nor do I think it is entirely a coincidence that post-modern skepticism of science has reached its peak as theism in academia has declined).  In actuality, theism provides arguably the best epistemology for the growth of science.  In an atheistic world, for example, there is no necessary reason to assume that my mental mechanisms can accurately observe and encode the world. Indeed, the very statement (to take one example) “my shirt is made of cotton and not made of cement” is, in an atheistic world, simply a product of atoms and molecules and biological forces moving in my brain.  That statement existing in my brain is no different than the movement of the planets, or the processes that cause me to sleep or dislike eating rocks.  There is no reason to suppose that because that phrase appeared in my mind as a result of pre-determined mechanistic forces, that it is necessarily “true” in any meaningful sense. 

Nor is there any reason to suppose that we could ever determine if it were “true.”  Truth assumes order and stability and working minds designed to comprehend it.  While of course it is possible that those things are accurate descriptions of an atheistic universe, atheism provides no necessary reason – no clear guiding framework – no real assurances – that anything can actually be “true.” The whole concept of truth is quite out of court in the atheist world.  Since science is the search for true facts about our world through observation, atheism is not the most natural fit for science.

In contrast, most theistic worldviews presuppose that God made the universe in such a way that humans can accurately understand it at some level.  That God made things out there that are real and have real properties, and that humans can actually learn about and classify those real things.  That my mind isn’t just any other old thing like a rock; that it is especially made to understand a universe that fits with it; my mind and the universe were made by the same Maker with the goal that they complement each other.  Thus, the very power that drives science – the power of observation to understand our universe – is a far better fit with theism than with atheism.  Atheism isn’t a barrier to science; but it also doesn’t provide a clear reason for its existence.  Theism may end up being false; but it certainly provides a far more natural framework for the epistemology of science than atheism does.

Sure, some theists are opposed to science.  Who cares?  Some New York Yankees fans are opposed to Babe Ruth.  Does that mean Yankees hate Babe Ruth?  Some atheists are opposed to morality.  Does that mean that atheism produces immorality?  This argument from Grundy is like saying “The tendency for atheists to engage in fraud is a product of their inherent evil tendencies” just because one evolutionary atheist claimed to have found the “missing link” in a (now proven to be) fraudulent fossil known as Piltdown Man.

In any event, I am a theist, and the more I am convinced of theism, the more I like science.  It has never occurred to me to be opposed to scientific enquiry in any meaningful way.  So statements like this – about how theists are opposed to science because of our “dogmatism” – seem very, very far afield from anything I have ever believed or been taught…and I wonder why we are even talking about this?  [Editorial Staff comment: The discerning reader will no doubt note that the reason we are currently talking about it is because the Apologetic Professor himself is rambling on about it in his usual pompous fashion.  What can we say to this except…we are deeply sorry.  On the other hand, you, dear reader, must take some responsibility because if you are reading this, you got all the way to the end of this ridiculous post.  Don’t encourage him!] 

Personally, I would like to get on with the real question about whether God exists – and next week, we will!

Posted in Christian Approach to Knowledge, Does God Exist?, Myths About Christianity, Science and Religion | 3 Comments

An Offering from the Opposition

Posted on May 1, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

And now for something totally different.  This week the Apologetic Professor is delighted have a guest author.  His name is Grundy and he authors an awesome and entertaining blog at DeityShmeity.com.  If you are the Blog-Title-Discerning-Reader that I take you for, you will no doubt note that this is not a typical title for a Christian blog. Indeed, Grundy is an Atheist.

(Other than disagreeing with Grundy about the question of God, my main problem with this guy is that his blog has a much cooler name than mine.  Drat!).

Why the guest piece?  Consider it a part of a cultural exchange of sorts designed to encourage dialogue between Atheists and Christians.  To that end, I’ll be posting a piece on his blog this week as well, which you can access at DeityShmeity.com.  I’ll also be offering a response to his article on my own blog, most likely in my post next week (if I can resist offering comments for a week).

Anyway, with no further introduction, I’ll post Grundy’s article below!  

A Personal Relationship with Atheism

Atheism isn’t a worldview. It isn’t a belief system. It’s a single belief, or as many of us phrase it, a “lack of” a single belief. It’s not a religion, it has no dogma or doctrine, and it only unites us under the same wide umbrella as the label “theism” unites the rest. Theism, as many of you know, includes categories such as polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, and dystheism as well as specific faiths like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity–some of which are further broken down into even more specific faiths. A diverse spectrum of belief systems falls under the “theist” label. Atheists don’t have this plethora of sub-genres because each of us are ideological free-agents. For the most part, we don’t bundle opinions, opting to make a belief system unique to the individual. There have been attempts to deviate from our ironically shared nonconformity, such as the formation of the Brights, Atheism+, and “New Atheism”–but I don’t know many proud members, and I’ve come to know a lot of atheists. I consider these groups valid for what they are–the vocal minority.

I used to wonder why uniting atheists is like herding cats. I’ve concluded (correctly or not) that it’s because the disbelief of God is based on doubt while the belief in God is based on faith. Atheism is a very skeptical mindset that is a product of nurture and nature. I see it as nurture in that critical thinking is a learned skill that is more often valued in the secular communities that atheists were either raised in or happened upon during a deconversion. I see it as nature in that genes for both skepticism and gullibility are likely selected for different reasons from an evolutionary standpoint. For example, an early man who thinks twice about berry consumption will likely survive longer than one who concludes that if one berry is a good food source, they all must be equally good. Conversely, it will benefit that man’s friend to believe his theory of dangerous berries. This results in a population that has varying degrees of a trusting and a questioning instinct. I have the more skeptical variety.

Speaking of evolution, I’ve heard claims that belief in science is a part of the alleged atheist belief system. First, I’ll say that’s not necessarily true. There are those who don’t believe in God, and thereby textbook atheists, while having significant doubts about accepted scientific discoveries. For example, you’ll have a hard time finding a more outspoken atheist than Bill Maher, but he doesn’t accept germ theory and is sympathetic to the anti-vaccination community. Still, I realize that there is significant overlap between atheists and science enthusiasts. To this I’d point out that accepting observable data is only a part of a belief system in the same way that trusting our own senses is part of a belief system. Anything demonstrated to work repeatedly and consistently on reality’s terms requires no belief…but you might as well believe it. The tendency for theists to deny science is a product of their need to cling to the dogma that runs counter to the way things are, or at the very least, the way things appear.

With these wide range of positive possibilities, it became top male sexual health enhancement tonic choice. viagra sales in uk It has been approved by FDA (Food and Drug viagra generico cipla Administration) to cure impotence. Simply because this poses a risk of developing cardiac arrhythmia and torsades de pointes, have been seen in pages of high fashion magazines, on runways, and on the streets worn by viagra online store some of the world’s most well known generic erectile dysfunction enhancer. One must not spit the soft tablet http://cute-n-tiny.com/tag/lobster/ order cheap levitra after chewing it. Generalizations of atheists are no more informative than stereotypes of any other diverse group. If nothing else, this should be the takeaway from this post. We’re all unique snowflakes. That said, I’d now like to provide as much insight into me personally as I can. The following traits and tendencies all contribute to my dismissal of the God hypothesis.

I am comfortable with the unknown. I’ve often heard Christians say that divine creation makes more sense than “something from nothing”–as if that is the generally accepted atheist view. It is not. I imagine this started as an innocent straw man that captured the imaginations of apologists across the globe. I’d blame William Lane Craig, but then I always blame William Lane Craig. The most accurate model for our early universe is the Big Bang Theory, which most atheists and many theists accept. However, this model only explains the early expansion of the universe, not its ultimate origin. It can be fun to speculate…but you know what you do when you assume. Therein lies the problem with the so-call Cosmological Arguments. Like much apologetic reasoning, it relies on a gap of human knowledge and either inserts a new claim or retrofits old claims. As we advance, the gaps keep closing, but I’ll be the first to admit that many still exist. I’m simply comfortable with my lack of omniscience.

I am comfortable with chance. To quote a prolific philosopher, “s#!t happens.” God provides meaning and worth to a life that can’t possibly matter in the grand scheme of a natural reality. Regardless of how many lives you touch or how much wealth you accumulate, in a million years your only legacy will be atoms dispersed across the galaxy. I see the appeal of God, I really do, but desire doesn’t dictate reality. We used to think there was a design to life, but now we know that we are products of evolutionary trial-and-error. The most successful organisms live long enough to find similarly successful mates to pass the best genes on for future generations to build. At the most fundamental scales of matter, we see particles that can only be represented as probabilities as predicted by the uncertainty principle. Our concept of “God’s plan” has been continuously altered to conform to new information. I have to ask at what point will the goalpost be so moved that the game is no longer relevant? For me, that moment has already passed.

There are other reasons an unplanned existence is more reasonable. An unguided world allows for answers to huge theological dilemmas, most notably the Problem of Evil–which is only a problem when a divine puppeteer is held responsible. The Problem of Evil can be distilled down to a Problem of Fairness in which everything from natural disasters to drunk drivers can ruin the lives of good people. If this occurs according to God’s plan (according to all but the most deistic theists) then they are decidedly unjust by every human standard. Saying that God’s standard is higher than ours or that he works in “mysterious ways” is an admission of a problem with the only solution boiling down to turning a blind eye. When I am posed a complex moral dilemma, I weigh who is harmed against who benefits and make the most informed decision possible—knowing that there may be no objectively right answer. In my eyes it’s a more honest than artificially raising the contrast of a gray world to black and white.

I am comfortable with my eventual nonexistence. When I tell people that I don’t think anything happens to us when we die, my audience usually perceives me as the ultimate pessimist. Somehow, this is true even when my audience thinks hell is a real option. This baffles me. I think, “how narcissistic is it to think ceasing to be is less favorable than eternal torture?” I’m aware that many theists overlook the fire and brimstone of their holy book, hoping their God relies more on a reward system for obedience. That’s fine. I honestly don’t have a problem with belief in heaven, but I, personally, don’t have it. I’m comfortable with returning to my preconception state knowing that, while I may not be happy about it, I’ll be incapable of being sad. I’m of the opinion that there is no point worrying about something I can’t control and I’m as certain as I can be that my belief in heaven isn’t going to change my prospects of the hereafter. I see no good reason to believe in an afterlife and until there is, I won’t. That’s how I form every belief. Besides, by lowering my expectations I save room to be pleasantly surprised.

I am uncomfortable with absolute authority. If there is anything we can learn from history, it’s that leaders often do horrible things when no checks or balances are in place. In fact, there is no one there to tell them what they are doing is horrible–because if anyone did, something horrible would happen to them. This is a function of relative power and authority. God, if He exists, has ultimate power and authority. The authors of the bible knew this and have depicted Yahweh and/or Jehovah accordingly. Both experience and scripture inform my aversion to absolute authority, but it doesn’t contribute to my disbelief in God. It contributes to why I wouldn’t worship Him even if He did exist.

Lastly, and I think most importantly, I am uncomfortable with the supernatural. I am skeptical of the accounts in most holy books because they come from a time before photography, video, the printing press, and widely adopted reading and writing proficiency. I’m skeptical of holy books because their authors and distributors had a vested interest in maintaining and gaining control by leveraging the power of legend. I’m skeptical of holy books because scholars have reached little or no consensus as to which books were forged, exaggerated, plagiarized, misinformed, or authentic. However, all this could be overlooked if I really wanted to believe. What I can’t overlook is the miracles. There’s the splitting of the Red Sea, walking on water, resurrections, talking snakes and donkeys and shrubbery, water turns to wine and sometimes blood, the divine duplication of seafood and baked goods—I seriously don’t see how anyone can believe this and not be just as credulous reading tales of Dracula and King Arthur? The rotation of the earth stops at some point so Joshua can have more daylight to kill Amorites. It just stops.

I don’t want to come off as insulting, but I see this as fantasy and I have a hard time understanding how other adults do not. The above applies mostly to Christianity, but only because I know my audience. Other religious texts take just as many liberties with our experience of reality. I believe everything has a rational, natural explanation free of magic and divine intervention only because it’s been true (or looks like it will be true) for everything anyone has investigated in my lifetime. If you don’t feel the same, fine, but please try to understand. This isn’t a hurdle an apologetic argument can or should overcome. It requires a childlike faith. I just don’t have it anymore. I’m glad I don’t.

Posted in Does God Exist? | 7 Comments

The Joy of Watching Academics Squirm About Pre-Cognition

Posted on April 22, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

In my experience, academics are lovable, thoughtful, delightful people…but some of them (us?) are also implicitly – and colossally – arrogant.   They seem to suffer the same fate as pastors – because they are viewed by a portion of the population as having some kind of special power, they come to believe that they actually do have some special power.  When in actual fact, they are just people like everyone else who have a little more training on one very narrow topic.  An academic or pastor has no more right to tell you what to believe about the existential and spiritual questions that matter to you than you have to tell them about it.  Yet, they often do not believe that.  They buy into their own hype.  No self-respecting plumber believes that their specialized and narrow knowledge base makes them more qualified to talk to you about whether or not life has any meaning.  But academics and pastors seem uniquely afflicted with this arrogant belief about themselves.

One of my own peculiar character defects is that I thoroughly enjoy watching such people squirm uncomfortably in their elitist and arrogant pants.  (Unless, of course, the arrogant person in question is me…but let’s not have any Uncomfortable Self-Analysis here.  This is, after all, the internet!  Hardly the place for critical self-reflection).   And so I’ve been having fun the last year or so with a particular issue; and I want to tell you why.

Although it’s a misnomer that academics are universally atheists (and indeed recent evidence suggests, contrary to common opinion, academia is becoming more religious; for example, the younger generation of academics is more prone to believe in God than the older generation), in my own field, the stereotype holds true.  Social psychologists are a notoriously atheistic, materialistic lot.  They would never believe in something like Extra-Sensory Perception, because, well, that just doesn’t make sense in a materialistic worldview.  By definition, something could not be sensed in an extra-sensory fashion.

Well, I can literally sense the blowing of narrow academic minds everywhere at the shocking and recent publication of a paper showing that maybe we do have ESP-like abilities after all.  Now, I’m in touch with my field, and there has been this rumor floating on the wind for at least 15 years that some researchers were doing work on pre-cognition – that is, on how we perceive things that haven’t happened to us yet – but they could not get it published.  It was never mainstream enough to qualify.

This changed suddenly when a very famous social psychologist published a nine-study package in the most influential journal in social psychology – the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  (Indeed, JPSP is one of the most influential journals in the whole world, and one of the hardest to get published in.)  And this highly-influential and rigorous journal published this large and comprehensive set of studies that basically shows that stuff that is about to happen to you (but hasn’t happened to you yet) influences you right now.  That is pre-cognition: You are somehow able to perceive what will happen to you in five minutes, and it influences you right now.

In case you don’t believe me, go read it for yourself. Here is the citation:

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100: 407-425.

Basically, what Bem did was take common effects in psychology and reverse the temporal order to see if those effects would still happen if the manipulation occurred after the key measurement.  For example, consider the common effect that you are more likely to remember something if you have rehearsed it.  Imagine that you were given 48 words, randomly assigned to rehearse 24 of them, and then given tasks to see if you could remember the 48 words on the original list.  You would be more likely to remember the 24 words you rehearsed than the 24 you did not rehearse.

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Needless to say, this finding has caused no small amount of consternation in the buttoned-up, stuffy, dogmatically-materialistic world that I live in.  And I for one have thoroughly and completely enjoyed watching it!

Now you may wonder if Bem is a spiritualist with some sort of agenda.  Not apparently.  Quite the contrary – his JPSP article basically says “look, I’ve no idea why this is happening, but science has often progressed without first having a material explanation for phenomena, and this phenomenon is real and therefore we should try to offer a scientific explanation for it.”  Hardly the stuff of spiritualist legend.

You may also wonder what I, as a Christian, think about this finding?  Well, if you don’t, too bad – it’s my blog and I’m gonna tell you anyway.

First, my worldview neither expects nor prohibits a belief in pre-cognition. As such, I’m philosophically agnostic about it – kind of like I am about aliens and the existence of Billy Ray Cyrus’ career.  Christianity says God is, in some way, outside of time, or at least that He knows the future.  It also suggests that some people are given prophecies about what is going to happen, and quite possibly that some people more generally have prophetic abilities.   So it’s possible that some people are more likely to have a kind of natural ability to see the future – to have heightened pre-cognitive abilities, if you will.  (If so, my wife is clearly one of them, but that’s another story).  But that’s only one way to view prophecy in the Christian perspective – it’s possible that pre-cognition in the general sense happens, but it isn’t necessary to keep the idea of Christian prophecy in tact.

Second, while it’s fun to watch people squirm about this finding, it isn’t like it would be a clean win for Christianity if it’s true.  I mean, one could argue that, say, evidence that the Bible has predicted future events is a point in favor of Christianity.  But if science can ultimately establish a physical link to explain pre-cognition, it might eventually weaken this claim somewhat.  Of course, it’s worth noting that this set of studies goes nowhere near that – it’s talking about 5 minute intervals (not 700-year intervals) and Bem admits up front that there really isn’t a currently-available physical explanation – but, still, one can’t just assume that no physical explanation exists.  As someone who has studied the psychology of time a bit myself, I personally think time is a potentially-malleable and funny thing that’s hard to digest, and I would not rule out a physical explanation for these phenomena.  Nor would my faith be troubled by such physical explanations: My point is not that it would really strongly matter one way or the other, but that, while in one sense this research validates that the universe is in fact broader than the average atheist thinks, it isn’t a clean “win” from a Christian point of view.  It’s more in the “this is interesting but irrelevant” category of things.

Finally: It may surprise you to learn that I’d bet a lot of money that the finding is a fluke – I don’t trust it. I’ve read the paper myself, and I can’t really explain the set of findings away easily…but it’s worth noting that recent replication attempts have so far failed to replicate Bem’s findings.  Our lab may attempt a replication, too, just for the fun of it.  But I, too, share the general skepticism of other scientists about it.

See, I don’t have to believe a finding to enjoy watching arrogant academics squirm about it!  I enjoy it in part because I myself am completely open-minded about the whole thing, whereas the materialist camp clearly is not.  I mean, really, it doesn’t matter one whit to me – my belief system is broad enough to digest any possible outcome in this regard.  But the tried-and-true materialist has a bit more of a quandary on their hands, if this finding turns out to be true.  And the religious (there is no other word) fervor with which people fight against such findings amuses me.  It’s as if someone walked into a Baptist Sunday school class and said “Jesus is NOT real”!  I’m not recommending you personally attempt the experiment, but when it happens, there is no other phrase for it except…pure entertainment.

Posted in Christian Approach to Knowledge, Science and Religion | 6 Comments

Capturing our Culture Through Movie Blurbs

Posted on March 19, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

I was sifting through movies on DISH today and saw one called “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag.”  That sounded a little odd, so I clicked on it to read the blurb, which said something about a jet passenger accidentally taking the wrong bag at the airport – a bag that turns out to have 8 severed heads in it from a mob killing.  That weird plot got me to thinking about how my friend Kevin in British Columbia said one of his favorite hobbies was reading movie blurbs, and that reminded me that I was really quite bored at the moment, and that got me to thinking that movie blurbs are kind of like mini-summaries of the state of our culture, and that reminded me that I’ve been awfully slack in posting things on this blog lately.

Using my highly integrative mind, this made me think: Voila!  I can actually entertain myself, comment on our culture, and write my blog, all at the same time!  All I have to do to accomplish this 3-for-1 is to sit for an hour and write down my thoughts as I read movie blurbs.  So here we are!  I present to you: A little experiment using movie blurbs to define our culture (and entertain myself) at your expense.

4:37 PM: I decide to start with PG-13 movies for the very altruistic reason that most of the movies I like fall into that category.  So I sift through the PG-13 movie blurbs on DISH and what I find is…disheartening.  Goodness, other than a movie about a jewel thief leaving a robot to his son, almost all of these movies involve revenge, killing, or evil spirits.  There is even one about revenge killings by evil spirits.  I kid you not.  Lots of references to destruction, abduction, a vast array of nasty words ending in “uction.”  And let me tell you, as the author of that last sentence, I can say with certainty that that just don’t sound right. 

4:41 PM. I begin to officially fear for our culture.

4:43 PM. These blurbs have no creativity at all.  I begin to think that my friend Kevin’s hobby isn’t as fun as he claimed.  I also remember, coincidentally, that Kevin liked making stained glass candle-holders.  Maybe he wasn’t the best barometer of fun, is all I’m saying.

4:45 PM. I’m trying to find a diamond in the rough here, and this is the most entertaining of the PG-13 lot so far:

Spoken Word: A poet falls prey to the lure of criminal life after he returns home to care for his dying father.

There’s some entertainment value in poets turning to crime…and it isn’t the usual movie trajectory for dying fathers to create a criminal life, but still…I’m reaching here.  That’s really not that interesting.

4:47 PM. Something interesting just happened for the PG-13 crowd.  Whew – I thought this blog post was going to be totally boring.  So, see if you can fill in the missing “thing” at the end of this movie blurb:

Four teenage friends keep in touch during their summer apart by passing along a cherished…

If you said “tradition of kindness” or “letters from each other,” then you are wrong.  The correct answer is: “…pair of blue jeans.”  Yep, this is apparently some seriously cherished pair of blue jeans. 

Now, you may be wondering about the title of this movie.  So am I.  The given title on Dish is “Sisterhood of the travelling p…”   I mean that.  It says “p…”  Now I’m seriously wondering: Why can’t Dish make it so that I can see the whole title?  I mean, how freakin’ hard would that be?  I click on it in every possible way – no dice.  I start cursing at the remote control…this also, to my surprise, does not help.  What is going on? Is this an intentional effort to frustrate us?  Or are they trying to turn us all into Europeans…where life has more questions than answers?  Or perhaps the movie title really does have an ellipsis in it?

No – I must assume that the word is supposed to be PANTS.  Culture intelligence scale: Trending downwards. 

4:50 pm.  I give up on PG-13 and move on to PG movies.The PG movies fare a little better.  Right off the bat, we’re talking about teenage surfers riding mythical surf breaks with goofy names (Chasing Mavericks), and biology teachers doing karate to save a music program (I mean, that’s like three totally different occupations in one sentence – not bad; from Here Comes the Boom).  Some nice cultural commentaries (The Wish List – “a woman lists the traits of her perfect man, then falls for a guy who meets none of the criteria”), and one use of the always-funny phrase “crotchety fellow” (Dennis the Menace). Of course, you also have the usual and boring boilerplate romance fare (“a man mistakenly e-mails the wrong woman with a message of affection” – seriously, that’s all you got to make me want to watch this movie?), an entire movie apparently about someone dreading his twin sister’s visit at Thanksgiving (Jack and Jill), and then there’s this (from Continental Divide):

A pudgy, chain-smoking Chicago columnist has a love affair with an ornithologist studying bald eagles in the Rockies.

So ok, yeah, it’s a pretty good bet that I don’t want to watch a love story about an…ornithologist.

4:54 PM. I’m noticing a disturbing trend: A lot of these PG and PG-13 movies have direct references to breaking the Ten Commandments…adultery, murder, lying, and now, in Raw Edge, we add coveting to the list:

Assorted men and an outsider covet the wife of a Oregon land baron.

Equally as disturbing is the poor grammar…“a Oregon”?  I’m pretty darn sure the correct grammar here should be “a tree-hugging Oregonian.”

(I didn’t just type that, right?  I mean, it just appeared in my head…right?)

American Culture: 0.

American Culture’s vague and poorly-defined opponent: 3.

A man doesn’t need to worry anymore about his erection problem, as its oral drug solution is available with the valsonindia.com cialis india discount energetic Sildenafil citrate. Admittedly, there are cialis generika valsonindia.com quite a number of products out there that can be of immense help. Issues getting or keeping an erection might be an innovative device with regard to owning solution viagra cheap prices only for erection problems without having issues which include by means of taking that may help you treating. Now, the browse here discount cialis has lost the patent from their hands and all the medicine producing companies are producing the medicine with cheap rate. 5:06 PM.  I’ve had enough of bad grammar and so I move on to the G Movies. Not only do these G movies have a little bit less in the way of Ten-Commandments-breaking, they are also more varied and entertaining.  Right off the bat we get these three gems:

Hercules in New York: Banished Hercules catches an escaped bear, cruises Broadway and wrestles professionally.

Darby O’Gill and the Little People: An Irish caretaker lands in the underground realm of a leprechaun king and his wee bouncing subjects.

The Thirteenth Year:  As a boy approaches adolescence he grows scales and fins, communicates with fish and breathes underwater.

I think each week of your life should involve mythical Greek figures cruising Broadway and catching bears for undisclosed reasons, “wee bouncing subjects,” and boys with scales and fins.

5:07 PM. I’m finally beginning to think of a point to this piece which, as I’m sure you noticed, doesn’t seem particularly relevant to anything, much less useful to an apologetics website.  The point might be: I’m reminded of a quote by G. K. Chesterton that says sin, in the end, leads to sameness and dullness, while goodness leads to variety and creativity.  Sin eventually turns into a pursuit of pleasure that is meaningless and looks the same regardless of category; goodness has as many varieties as there are people.  Sin is black; goodness isn’t merely white – it is all the colors of the rainbow (which they tell me white is made up of; I hope that’s true, because it would make this metaphor work better).

Well, in some loose way, this has reminded me of that.  The worse the rating here, on average the more the movies seemed to basically be alike – sex, murder, violence – they all sound the same. It is only when you take those out of the equation that you get things that are truly creative…truly different…truly alive. 

5:17 PM. Several problems with this interpretation emerge as I continue my little experiment.  First, I think I just got lucky off the bat, because I gotta admit that most of these G movies sound REALLY boring.  A lot of them are like this:

Oogieloves: Balloon Adventure.  The oogieloves set out the find five magical balloons that will make their good friend’s surprise birthday party extra-special.

I mean, first – and I assume I speak for all of humanity here – I don’t want my kid watching anything called the “oogieloves.”  Second, if I’m on an adventure where I am set to find cool magical objects, I hope that I aim a little higher than making a friend’s birthday party just a little bit extra-special. I’d hope for something more like save the universe from evil.

5:20 PM. And sometimes, these G blurbs are documentaries about…fish.  I kid you not.  I mean, people really watch documentaries about fish?  (And there it is, Jim…a fish…and look!  I think it’s…yes, I believe it is…YES!  It’s definitely swimming! I cannot believe my eyes, Jim.)

5:22 PM. And a lot of them are real movies that seem like they’d be animal documentaries, like this one:

The Black Stallion: Shipwrecked with a wild Arabian horse, a 1940s boy bonds with the animal on a tiny desert island.

Of course, many of these are fine movies, but the descriptions hardly inspire.  Yes, The Black Stallion SOUNDS boring, but I’ve seen the movie and I can tell you…well, ok, actually, it is as boring as it sounds.

5:25 PM. Also, a lot of these G movies involve breaking the Ten Commandments, too.  I mean, check this out, from a 1935 movie with Gene Autry:

The Sagebrush Troubador: A singing lawman and his sidekick hunt a killer and find a blonde.

I mean, really, I don’t want my daughter growing up thinking it is ok for a lawman to sing.  That kind of thing just ain’t natural.

There is seriously even one G movie involving an evil spirit seeking some kind of revenge.  A G movie?  What are we teaching our kids these days.

5:28 PM.  I weary of G movies and decide to take one small foray into the R movies.  The first movie has “sexy” in it.  I quit.

Culture: 0.

Vaguely-defined Cultural Opponents: 4.

5:31 PM. All in all, what have we learned from this?  I would say that I have learned never to base a blog post off of a movie blurb that you didn’t write down word-for-word, because later on, when you go to write it down, you may not be able to find it. (I’m beginning to doubt whether “8 Heads in a Duffel Bag” is, in fact, a real movie.) And that’s the end of my experiment!

Posted in Rather Bizarre Social Commentary | 2 Comments

From the Reader Mailbag: Is God in the Same Category as a Lucky Ball (Part II)?

Posted on March 4, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

This week we continue our discussion of whether or not God can be viewed as a kind of lucky object.  As a reminder, here is the question from a reader that we are pursuing:

Reader Question: The question is how any system of reasoning could say definitively that something doesn’t exist? Like you said correctly it can’t be done 100% for sure, because it could very well be that we just haven’t seen the evidence. BUT! And it is a big but for a reason – that statement in itself provides absolutely no more weight to the existence of miracles as to the existence of other cultural phenomena. I could say millions of people have experienced and would attest to the reality of ‘lucky objects’ for instance. Is there any evidence for these lucky objects? Not so far aside from easily turnable and interpretable personal experience. But so far as our trusted techniques of testing go that have unveiled untold knowledge about the natural world, there so far appears to be no evidence of lucky objects actually conferring skewed chances for people.

Last week, I pointed out that maybe the reader is a little too quick to disbelieve in lucky balls.  This week, we’ll take a different tack by granting the argument and seeing where it takes us.

To summarize your argument: We have evidence-by-absence against lucky objects (undoubtedly true); we trust that evidence; that trust is rational; therefore why don’t we follow the same logic of evidence-by-absence with the supernatural?  That’s a fair argument. So let’s turn now to the question: What about the overlap between the cultural phenomenon of believing in the lucky object, and the cultural phenomenon of believing in a miraculous God?  Are those two things in the same category, and if so, what does that mean?

There is a sense that I agree with you – there is some overlap between the two.  They are both constructions shaped by culture; they are both about forces beyond nature.  So it is certainly one possibility that our belief in lucky balls and God both represent cultural misfires, so to speak – and thus, it is possible to argue that, to the degree we can “disprove” the lucky ball, that shows how an essentially “false” cultural belief can grow up.  By proxy, this might show a process for how we have a “false” belief in the supernatural.

Fair enough. Let’s assume for a moment that we could definitively prove that there is no such thing as a lucky object.  Let’s also assume that the lucky ball and God are in a similar category of culturally-believed, culturally-communicated items.  What does this mean? 

Consider a parable.  If I wanted to find out if my back yard had rattlesnakes, how confident could I ever be in saying “no, there are no rattlesnakes?”  I could do hundreds and hundreds of searches over fifty years.  If I never found a single rattlesnake, I could be reasonably certain that there were no rattlesnakes there…although it is still possible I missed one.  In this case, evidence-by-absence is somewhat meaningful, because the possible scope of enquiry is very small.  Now, imagine instead that my question was “are there rattlesnakes in the Rattlesnake wilderness?”  (It turns out that this is a potentially controversial question).  The Rattlesnake wilderness is like 60,000 acres full of mostly-wild country.  There are some reasons to think it possible that rattlesnakes might exist there, even though it is unclear if anyone has ever seen one.  It would be far more difficult to definitively prove from evidence-by-absence that there were no rattlesnakes there.  I mean, you could say that you haven’t seen any; but as the scope of enquiry widens, the arrogance of asserting confidence due to a lack of positive evidence also becomes greater. 
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So too here.  Belief in the supernatural, writ large, differs from the lucky ball in that the supernatural implies a huge range of things that are very difficult to directly disprove.  While in a sense that makes it an irritating and untestable theory of life from a scientific point of view, it also means that it is hard to find a definitive scientific test to disprove it.  It’s like evolutionary theory – its major strength (its breadth and all-encompassing flexibility) is also its major weakness (it explains almost too much, therefore it is hard to specifically disprove).  Whereas the lucky ball is a very narrow idea that at least opens itself to very specific hypotheses, making an inability to find evidence for those hypotheses at least somewhat meaningful, the larger belief in supernaturalism is not so easily cornered.

To change the metaphor, it is the difference between asserting that there is no alien life on the moon because we haven’t found it yet and asserting that there is no alien life in the rest of the universe because we haven’t found it yet.  They are in the same domain of enquiry, but the first, while not foolproof, is a meaningful deduction from evidence-by-absence…the second is simply silly.  The scope of the universe is too vast.

Similarly, the possibility of the supernatural is a fairly large canvas, and there are some good reasons to believe in it, even if you have no definitive proof of its existence.  The possibility of a lucky ball is a question much smaller in scope; lack of evidence for it isn’t definitive, but I do grant that it is more meaningful. Thus, although belief in miracles and belief in the lucky ball are in some sense related, they are wildly different in scope…and thus wildly different with regard to our current question of the possibility of evidence-by-absence. 

That much is pretty basic.  Now, as I mentioned earlier, I do think the overlap between lucky balls and God is real, and I meant that.  But I think they are in the same category in the same sense in which I think Osiris is in the same category as Jesus.  They are both about the possibility of the supernatural, about forces beyond normal natural processes occurring.  In my mind, though, the real question we ought to be asking is: Why on earth do so many people believe in the lucky ball? Well, I’d say in part it’s because we are primed to believe in supernatural things.  And why is that?  If we assume that (a) there is no actual effect of a lucky ball, yet (a) people believe in the effect of said ball…well, what does that mean? The fact that Santa Claus is not real does not change the fact that we WANT him to be real.  To some degree, we want to believe in magical objects. Arguing that because people create fake gods = there is no real God is like arguing that because people create counterfeit money, there is no real money.  Well, it may be so – but maybe the existence of counterfeits points to (rather than disproves) the existence of the real thing?  Both hypotheses are equally plausible, and therefore we are back where we started by pursuing that line of reasoning.

By the by, since you seem to have such a high faith in science, are you also willing to consider the scientific evidence from the medical community that intercessory prayer on behalf of a third person actually works?  It’s a controversial issue (see a biased run-down with a materialist slant here), and I haven’t read any of the research myself because I think it’s a stupid approach (I mean, really, do you think God, after millennia of withholding His full glory and countless times demonstrating His complete unwillingness to be manipulated by humans, is suddenly going to reveal Himself in a double-blind study from Columbia?)…but my point is that there is certainly at least some evidence that third-party prayer works – even when the person in question does not know they are being prayed for.

To summarize the last two posts:  My response to the lucky ball argument is probabilistic.  It suggests that (a) it is actually possible that using evidence-by-absence in the case of even a very narrow idea like the lucky ball will lead you to close your mind too early to the truth – it may turn out that there is such a thing as a lucky ball.  It further suggests that (b) even if evidence-by-absence works in the case of the lucky ball, the lucky ball is a very narrow idea for which evidence-by-absence would have a better chance of working; whereas belief in miracles implies a large range of potential things that make it tough to disprove.  Thus, the combination of these two things makes me think that my original argument still holds: It is not very skeptical…certainly not very scientific…to be a tried-and-true materialist, to be someone that rules out up front the possibility of the miraculous.  I do not think this is a very good intellectual position.  Agnosticism about the question is respectable; but narrow-minded materialism turns a blind eye to positive evidence for the possibility of the miraculous, not due to scientific skepticism, but for pre-existing philosophical reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with science…or facts.

Posted in Christian Approach to Knowledge, Does God Exist?, Reader Mailbag | 4 Comments

From the Reader Mailbag: Is God in the Same Category as a Lucky Ball?

Posted on February 4, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

Reader Question: Apologetic Professor, if you could be any superhero, which superhero would you be?

My response: Don’t be ridiculous.  I am a superhero: Font Boy, with his awesome power of font recognition!  (My favorite catchphrase: Don’t be afraid, ma’am, that’s clearly a sans serif 11.5).  There is one thing, and only one thing, that can destroy Font Boy (kind of like kryptonite can destroy Superman)…the Wingdings font.  I mean, seriously, what evil genius made that font? 

[Editor’s note: As any true fan of the Font Boy comic strip knows, Font Boy is in reality also susceptible to both the Cherry Chapstick of Doom and the evil villain Italica. We apologize for the error. Font Boy Rocks! Be Bold!]

Reader Question: The question is how any system of reasoning could say definitively that something doesn’t exist? Like you said correctly it can’t be done 100% for sure, because it could very well be that we just haven’t seen the evidence. BUT! And it is a big but for a reason – that statement in itself provides absolutely no more weight to the existence of miracles as to the existence of other cultural phenomena. I could say millions of people have experienced and would attest to the reality of ‘lucky objects’ for instance. Is there any evidence for these lucky objects? Not so far aside from easily turnable and interpretable personal experience. But so far as our trusted techniques of testing go that have unveiled untold knowledge about the natural world, there so far appears to be no evidence of lucky objects actually conferring skewed chances for people.

My response: A very fair and clever argument containing an honest question.  And written in the classic Courier 12 font – a Font Boy favorite.   So much to like!

Actually, this reader comment reminds me of the whole debate about the ontological argument (which, you may recall, I gave a rather poor grade to on this prior post).  The ontological argument suffers in part because one can use it to prove the existence of infinitely high mountains as much as God.  If one can use a line of reasoning to prove the existence of ANYTHING, including things that probably aren’t real, then it isn’t a very good argument for that purpose.  Well, if one can use my line of reasoning to say that one should be open-minded about things that, for all reasonable purposes, we ought to probably be closed-minded about (like the effects of lucky balls), then it probably isn’t a very good argument.

First, let’s establish some common ground.  Yes, I do agree with you that in some sense, there are some negations one can be more confident about than others.  That’s clearly accurate.  I’m pretty confident that trees are not going to actively attempt to eat me as I walk through the forest, even though I technically can’t prove that they won’t.  Well, my fearless attitude towards flesh-eating trees as I walk the Rattlesnake is based on evidence-by-absence…and I’m perfectly fine with that, so am I selective in my use of the criteria?

Undoubtedly – but not irrationally selective.  Let’s distinguish between two categories: (A) Flesh-Eating Tree Category: Things that seem implausible that essentially nobody believes.  These are things for which there is no prior reason to believe in them; because there is no positive evidence for them.  I’m perfectly happy joining the rest of humanity in considering them likely false until I am suddenly and tragically eaten by an Ent.  I reserve some small amount of possibility for it when I think about it, but mostly I live my life as if it is not going to happen.  (B) Miracles/Lucky Ball/Ghosts Category:  These are things for which there is some prior reason to consider them as valid due to some positive evidence in their favor.  In this case, the reason we even talk about them is because lots and lots and LOTS of people believe in them.
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And now, assuming as I do that eaten-by-trees experiences are not ubiquitous in human experience, I turn to the cultural argument the reader actually made.  What of things that are more commonly-held beliefs (such as those in category B above) but may be false – such as the lucky ball or belief in ghosts?  Is it ok to use evidence-by-absence in such cases?

I’d like to make two points in response to this question.  However, it turns out that this post is already egregiously long, and thus I’ll have to hold off on point 2 until next week. At any rate, here’s point 1:

Before pursuing the overlap of the lucky ball with God, I’d like to point out that it is a little dangerous to rule out the validity of a common human experience without carefully considering all the evidence, and without keeping an open mind about it even if “scientific” research seems against it.  And yes, that includes the power of the “lucky ball” when you putt at golf.  You seem to be kind of smug about the “evidence” against lucky balls, but it is a good case study to figure out why do you disbelieve in lucky balls?  Is it because of scientific evidence (not a perfect reason – science has dismissed many things only to find evidence for it at a later date) or personal experience (which puts you in the category you said you are trying to avoid – “untested personal experience”) or because you read in the newspaper that some famous scientist said so (authority)?

In a sense, your lucky ball argument partially illustrates my original point. In my opinion, you too quickly dismiss the possibility of lucky balls, and it is precisely because you are relying too heavily on evidence by absence.  Science can’t find evidence of a lucky ball, therefore there isn’t any to be found.  Well, maybe science can’t find the evidence because it hasn’t used the right tool yet; maybe it is looking for a sub-atomic particle through a pair of binoculars. 

Consider this: A few years’ ago, most social psychologists (almost all of whom are atheists) would have similarly dismissed the idea of pre-cognition – being aware of something before it happened – as being “hokey.”  Lots of studies – plenty of scientific evidence – showed that it didn’t exist.  And yet, the most influential journal in the field just published a 9-study package arguing that people DO have the ability to predict things right before they happen.  So, when you throw around the word “evidence” as if there is “evidence” against lucky balls and miracles, I distrust it quite a bit.  “Evidence” in this sense is uncertain, when used to disprove the possible existence of something.  And it is often is based on a not-very-thought-out faith in the scientific method.  (If science can’t find an effect of the lucky ball, then it must not exist.  Well, I’m a huge fan of science – but an educated fan.  As a knowledge-gathering device, it, too, has its limitations).

Now, before I get all sorts of nasty e-mails from the anti-lucky-stuff-crowd, let me immediately say that I myself do not believe in lucky objects, and one day hope to write a book (currently existing only in my head for the last 20 years) called Beyond Superstition to explain exactly why.  (Actually, the first research study I ever designed was to help explain why people believe in lucky objects, so I’ve thought about that issue quite a bit). But my reason for not believing in them is more because of Christian philosophy and only partially because of a lack of “evidence” in their favor.  Christianity actually argues against a superstitious belief system.  All the same, my worldview would not come crashing down if lucky balls existed, and I think you dismiss too quickly the possibility of their existence.

Don’t get me wrong: I think your argument has merit, and indeed is a quite useful intellectual parallel.  Next week, I’ll continue this discussion of the lucky ball by discussing more specifically what happens if we grant the assumptions that (a) there is no real effect of a lucky ball, (b) people believe in the lucky ball anyway, and (c) the lucky ball overlaps conceptually with God.  All those assumptions are at least partially true, and next week we’ll discuss in more detail what that means for a belief in God as it pertains to evidence-by-absence. Stay tuned!

Posted in Christian Approach to Knowledge, Does God Exist?, Reader Mailbag, Science and Religion | 3 Comments

From the Reader Mailbag: Why I Believe in Jesus and Not Osiris

Posted on January 16, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

A couple of weeks ago, I had a delightful dialogue concerning my post Why Materialism is Not Skeptical, during which a commenter made some very reasonable replies to my hyperbolic post.  I’m not going to cover all those points here, but I’d encourage you to read it.

That discussion got me to thinking…I should more frequently answer reader questions/comments in blog posts.  You know, like the Doonesbury “reader mailbag” segment…only without the witty banter and drawings of guys with abnormally long noses.

Now I know what you are thinking: This guy is sooooo lazy that, rather than answering questions in a normal comment dialogue – the way other bloggers do – he’s going to attempt to kill two birds with one proverbial stone.  That cheap effort would allow him to address reader questions and meet his weekly blog quota at the same time.  He must therefore be an unmotivated sap!

To which I respond: You’d be largely right about that.

Anyhoo, I’ll start this new segment with the following question raised during the discussion over materialism:

Reader Question: Why is your bird angry at my tornado?

My response: Why does your tornado irritate my bird?  Next.

[Editor’s note: We apologize for the senior writer’s proclivity towards useless goofiness.  That was not an actual question from a living reader.  But the next one truly is a real question, ok?]

Reader Question: If you are to defend that some miracles exist while others do not, then I must ask what is the reason you believe in the resurrection of Jesus while not-believing the resurrection of Osiris?
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This is a perfectly reasonable question.  My primary answer is that I have not met Osiris (the Egyptian God who, in the ancient myth, died and was brought back to life) in my own world – if I do, then I will believe in him.  I believe I have met Christ – because He is still alive.

I realize that answer is not very intellectually satisfying, but really – there is a sense in which this question is like asking me why I believe in my wife, but not in an alien named Folek-Zantor. I’ve experienced one directly, but not the other.

(So, yeah, that is an extra-sucky answer.  So now I will at least try to say something that’s hopefully a little more intellectually inspiring.)

Yet there is another sense in which I do believe in Osiris…or at least, I believe in the kernel around which the Osiris story is perhaps the shell.  I might phrase it this way: I believe in Jesus because of Osiris.  The whole world seems ripe with the cry of life from death; the desire seems to extend across times and cultures; the Egyptians had it; I have it, too.  It’s the same desire I experience when I go to Rattlesnake Creek in April and I can just feel the whole sleeping world coming alive.  And, as it wakes, I want to wake up with it.  The call in the Bible to wake up, O sleeper, and rise from the dead isn’t something the Bible put in me; I already had it inside of me, just like the Egyptians had it inside of them.  Jesus seems to me the literal fulfillment of this desire, expressed through the centuries in a myriad of ways, for a resurrection. A re-birth. A renewal.

Why do I say Jesus is the “literal” fulfillment?  Well, Jesus was a real person who lived in a real time in a real place.  Osiris is the myth; Jesus is the reality.  Some people doubt Jesus’ resurrection, but few people doubt his existence as a real man.  Most historians grant that he existed and was killed in some way, and had disciples – real people – who knew him and did lots of stuff afterwards to spread his beliefs.  Show me the historians that believe that Osiris was a real person who had documented disciples – real people in the way that Peter was a real person – that actually knew Osiris.

Here is a link to one version of the Osiris myth – you can read it for yourself and make your own judgment. But to me, when I read that story, it is like a great epic poem or saga; but not like a history.  It does not contain real people known to have really existed; heck, it barely contains real places.  The New Testament is quite a contrast; it does not read like a myth, for the most part, but like a history.  It is about real places and real people during a real historical time period.  A lot of its content involves letters written by real people who lived in one place to real people who lived in another place.  A fair bit of the New Testament has been historically corroborated through archaeology and other historical accounts.  At the very least, it is highly unlikely that the whole story was just MADE UP out of someone’s head.

So, to go back to the question (mercifully, you might add!), I believe in this particular miracle – Jesus’ resurrection – because (a) I have a desire in me for re-birth, (b) this desire seems met in a historical event, and (c) I feel I have actually met the resurrected Christ from the historical event myself.  Of these, a and c are the most important – I mean, I would not believe in Jesus if I thought the entire New Testament was made up (as, for example, it appears to me the book of Mormon was mostly made up), but my own personal experience is what I trust the most…history can be a dicey business.

Next week, we’ll answer other reader questions, such as If the Apologetic Professor could be a superhero, what superhero would I be? and Is God in the same epistemological category as a lucky ball?

Posted in Reader Mailbag | 7 Comments

The Top 5 Worst Christian Movies of All Time (Part II)

Posted on January 2, 2013 by The Apologetic Professor

Back in the good old days, someone used to produce a book called The Big Book of Bad Poetry, which was a yearly anthology of the worst poetry published that year.  Now those folks get the joy of poorly-executed art.  Almost no one likes poetry, but really bad poetry is another matter entirely. (I think the editors of the series got bored with the idea when avant garde poetry methods hit the scene…kind of took the challenge out of it).  That was the most entertaining book ever!

The best football game I ever watched was a hilarious calamity of errors from start to finish.  (I think it was the junior college championship game in 1994). There were like 20 turnovers, and it was one of those rare experiences that, at almost every moment, felt like: I do not think this can possibly get any worse, but…oh, my!  It just did.  I remember at the very moment I was finally beginning to admire the sheer beauty of poorly-played football for its own sake, beginning to appreciate the art of disastrous sports – at that very moment, three turnovers in a row occurred…during the same play.  That’s right: One play, three turnovers.  Sports have always disappointed me ever since; no joy could ever measure up to that play.

Well, it’s in that spirit that I hope you can enjoy the joy of truly bad movies…and this week we continue my top 5 list of the worst Christian movies ever.  We’ll pick up with number 2. In fact, it turns out that we’ll almost certainly stop with number 2.  Yes, that’s right, I’m perfectly happy stopping a top 5 list at 2 (as I’m sure you’ve noted on prior posts, some of my top five lists have eight or even thirty five entries.  Why are you being such a numerical literalist?  So typical of you.)  This is the guy who said that Jesus talked of “gauging” your eyes out, remember?  I mean, as if Jesus was saying “it’s better for you to, you know, use an isometric sensometer gauge to measure your eye muscle tone than to end up in hell.”  (And no, don’t bother going back to find the blog post – I’ve changed it to read “gouge.”  Not even I wanted myself to look that stupid for posterity).

Enough already!  Here’s number 2.

2. Meteor Apocalypse. This movie’s main character is played by Joe Lando, who used to be famous as Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’s dashing beau.  And he can still act…sort of.  Really, this movie has disappointingly decent acting all around. So if you want bad acting, you’ll be cheated by this one.

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Now, I like earth-getting-destroyed sorts of movies, I really do, and I don’t mind suspending belief for a bit to enjoy them.  But really, it’s humorously difficult to believe that scattered pieces of a meteor would contaminate water with an undisclosed disease that can be cured by something in a little vial (I mean, think about this for one second – meteors don’t have any bacteria on them, right?  So what’s making people sick?  And what’s the stuff in the vial going to do, exactly?). It’s even more difficult to believe that these little meteorites would somehow hit every major cities’ water supply.  And no one apparently in any government office apparently thought to distribute bottled water or any of the hundreds of other easy solutions to the problem.  But of course, most of the people seem unaffected by the water problem, despite its widespread nature.  Huh?

And meanwhile, a big meteor is hurtling towards the earth – that no one seems to care about.  I mean, a few people are dying of a random disease, and sure that’s bad.  But…I don’t know…maybe it’s me…but I’d be a little more tuned in to the end of the world?

Yet the best is yet to come.  For at the very end of the movie, the meteor does arrive.  In fact, the main characters all watch the meteor, which is the size of Los Angeles, flatten the entire city of LA.  The special effects alone of this scene are enough to justify the price of the movie – it looks like it was done on my old Commodore 64, circa 1982. I once wrote a video game – in BASIC – that I swear had better graphics than that final scene.  It’s like a PONG flashback.  Blip…blip…blip.

But the most amazing part is how the movie actually ends.  I mean, this giant meteor flattens Los Angeles, and the main characters sit on a hillside right outside the city and watch the whole thing happen.  They are unscathed; and life goes back to normal, sans LA.  What in reality would be an event that would likely wipe out life on the entire planet doesn’t even scratch people who watch it on an adjacent hillside. Oh, the hilarity of it all!

Posted in Top 5 Lists, Ratings, and Rankings | 1 Comment

The Top 5 Worst Christian Movies of All Time

Posted on December 18, 2012 by The Apologetic Professor

I have lamented before (see this post) on the rather embarrassing state of Christian movie-dom.  In short, Christians are to movies what Republicans are to social programs…what Democrats are to spending cuts…what Pat Robertson is to Biblical interpretation…what Richard Dawkins is to reasonable argument.  We just don’t seem to quite have the knack of it.

Yet, I must admit that I’ve perhaps failed to see the positive side of our bad movie-making.  Namely: The most entertaining things in the world are things done really badly.  Think about some really boring thing, like watching golf on TV.  I mean, no self-respecting person can watch golf on TV when it’s played well.  You watch a close up…of a ball…flying…through the…air.  (Be still, my heart!  Oh, the suspense!  I wonder if that ball will ever land? Are those dimples fake or real?) But when someone does something really bad – like, say, when a professional golfer smacks a ball into the crowd, and it happens to hit a celebrity political figure and causes them to lose an election – well, now, that’s entertainment!  The only golf highlight of my entire life that I actually remember enjoying was when this professional golfer 8-putted on a hole.  I mean, he eight-putted!  Back and forth, back and forth, missing short put after short put.  Now that was entertaining!

Well, it is in that spirit that I’m proud to say we Christians have excelled at making bad movies.  I have been reading about major mainstream movie flops lately (did you know there was one movie that grossed only $20? True story.  I mean, that’s a movie production with what?…two people who watched it, nation-wide? Maybe four people, if it was a matinee?), and I’m very pleased to say that Christians have outdone them all.  So when you read the list of bad movies in this series of posts, take heart: You are reading about some of the worst attempts at art that humanity has ever produced.  The sheer joy of watching horribleness is worth the price of each of these movies.  Enjoy!

I had originally intended to post all five at once, but the post was getting kind of long…and I only made it to number 2…and I’m lazy…so I’m going to do this one at a time.  We’ll start with what is unarguably the worst movie in human history.  Next week we’ll pick up with #2.

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  1. Apocalypse. 

It really takes a special blend of badness to be this bad.  But this movie has that blend.  It is incomprehensibly bad.  Horribly bad.  Painfully – yet joyfully—horribly bad.  First, it looks like it was shot with a 1970s camcorder.  I’m serious.  I don’t know what separates movie-ish cameras from regular video cameras, but this movie demonstrates that something does.  Plus, the script-writing is absolutely painful.  It’s supposed to be an end-times thing through the eyes of some news people, but it basically turns into a mish-mash of incomprehensible events that seem to have no connection with each other.

But for all that, the supreme entertainment in this movie is the acting.  It is so very, very, very bad.  Holy cow!  I have never seen worse acting in my entire life.  It is like watching those characters in bad infomercials who are intentionally paid to look stupid.  (Big-haired actor says in shockingly over-enthusiastic manner, with giant plastic smile: “Like you, I once had a serious case of face barnacles.  But then I discovered…Face Barnacle-Be-Free!”).  If this were golf, and they were trying to make a putt, this wouldn’t be an eight-putt…they would still be putting after 15 years.  I have often encouraged my friends to watch this movie just to watch the bad acting.  It’s fantastic!

What’s curious about the bad acting (and the movie more generally) is that the same company produced a second installment in the series, called Judgment – and I actually really like that movie.  It still has some bad acting (especially from Mr. T), but mostly it’s well-done.  And in fact, one of the main characters from Apocalypse (the female reporter) who does such a bad job in that movie is really great, I think, in Judgment.  But Judgment isn’t a good enough movie for me to recommend you to watch it; Apocalypse, however, is so bad that it is worth watching.  Go get it today!  You won’t be sorry.  You won’t be able to stop telling all your friends about it tomorrow.

Posted in Rather Bizarre Social Commentary, Top 5 Lists, Ratings, and Rankings | 1 Comment