Ray a Day: 3:2

I'll start off today's Ray a Day with a quote by Ray:

Mockers think that they have a "smoking gun" as evidence against God, and are the sort of people in the front row of a lynching mob. ... They can't see clearly because they have a sequoia in their eye.

While I am somewhat amused that Comfort is saying Bible mockers have huge redwood trees (sequoia) in our eye. Is he saying we're missing the forest for the trees? If so, this is actually sort of clever, and so if this is what he means then I am officially awarding Ray another point. He now has two [2] points. Of course, the fact that he is one again painting atheists as terrible people ("in the front row of a lynching mob...") is pretty ironic considering in the next paragraph he tells us to stop whining about God commanding his followers to dash the heads of infants on rocks because that same God also ordered the death of all humans ("as a result of their sin").

Ray goes on:

The reason [when I was a child] that I believed in a creator was simply because I had a brain. ... the dictionary can help those who are a little slow to figure this out by checking out the words "creation" and "Creator".  Creation - noun, "the Creation, the original bringing into existence of the universe by God". Creator - noun, "the Creator, God"

 Thank you, Ray, for this absolutely perfect illustration of just how circular your position is. Not only did you (once again) not bother to cite the source you are quoting from, but your source is self-referential. Once again - the dictionary is a source of words and their commonly-used meanings. We're already aware of the fact that one uses creation and creator in these ways, so consulting a dictionary can only tell us how people commonly use words.

Moving on:

The reason anyone should fear God is because He is to be feared.

 Cool! and the reason God does not exist is because he doesn't exist. Moving on, a skeptic says, "Everything dies, everything dead rots, and everything rotten may serve as fertilizer for new life." Ray responds:

Skeptic's often unwittingly talk in the language of "absolutes." They say that "no one" can know if God exists, or, "no one" can know if there is life after death, or, as in this case, that "everything" dies and rots. Yet, those who talk in absolutes (as though they had absolute knowledge) reveal a lack of knowledge. For a skeptic to say, "No one knows what happens after death," he must know what everyone knows in order for him to know that no one knows. ... to be truthful, he has to say, "With the limited knowledge I have at present, I have come to the conclusion that no one knows what happens". ... The professing atheist is in the same boat. He can't say, "There is no God" and be truthful. ... The Skeptic isn't aware that God never dies. What's more, God promises that any living human being who comes to Him through repentance and faith in Jesus will not perish, but have everlasting life.

  So, in the same paragraph, Ray insists that anyone who talks in the language of absolutes reveals a lack of knowledge, and he then goes on to talk in the language of absolutes. This is obviously not the only time Ray has talked in the language of absolutes, so I find this to be beyond ironic. Apparently he is allowed to talk in the language of absolutes, but others who do so when claiming things he does not agree with reveal a lack of knowledge.

Truthfully, when I say something like, "everything dies and rots" I am speaking in shorthand. I am saying, "with my knowledge and observation, coupled with the knowledge and observation of those around me, coupled with knowledge and experimentation by scientists, and coupled with rational thinking, I have come to the conclusion that everything (that is, everything carbon-based, with the possible exception of Twinkies) dies and rots." If I had to say this every time I wanted to make a claim about the natural world around me, my conversations would take twice as long, so we use shorthand.

Interestingly, we can make absolute claims without revealing any kind of lack of knowledge at all. For example, I can say, "All bachelors are unmarried" and this will be true - indeed it will be true independent of my experience with bachelors or unmarried men.

This is what is known as an analytic proposition. So too, is "creation has a creator". However analytic propositions do not tell us, for example, if bachelors exist (in this particular world we have overwhelming evidence that they do), or if a given man is a bachelor. Analytic propositions are grounded in meaning.

Contrast this to synthetic propositions, which are grounded in fact (according to Quine) and rely upon experience as a determinant of truth. A few examples: "All bachelors are happy", "God punishes sinners", etc.

We can, in fact, say something like, "there is no god" and be truthful. Once we come up with a reasonable (falsifiable) working definition of God, we can refute it in the same way that we can refute the idea that drinking 8oz of cranberry juice cures facial paralysis.

If I were to claim that drinking cranberry juice can cure facial paralysis, how would we decide if my propostion were true? We would observe, experiment, and think about it. If we give people (with facial paralysis) 8oz cranberry juice to drink, and this doe not cure their facial paralysis, are we wrong to say that cranberry juice does not cure facial paralysis? If we give 100 people the juice, and no one is cured, can we still claim it works? If we give it to 1000 people, conduct double-blind, placebo controlled studies, and not one person is cured, are we wrong to say that cranberry juice does not cure facial paralysis? Do we need to give 8oz of cranberry juice to all people who have facial paralysis to conclude it doesn't work? Will we then say that since we can't possibly test all people (since some of them have died, and eventually we will die and our research will halt, leaving people with facial paralysis to never try the remedy) and so therefore we can't possibly say with absolute certanty that cranberry juice does not cure facial paralysis? Technically yes, but qualifying our knowledge with, "with my knowledge and observation, coupled with the knowledge and observation of those around me, coupled with knowledge and experimentation by scientists, and coupled with rational thinking, I have come to the conclusion that cranberry juice does not cure facial paralysis"

Demanding absolute knowledge from empirical evidence is a cop-out. It is a red herring. It is untenable. But in the everyday language we use, when scientists say, "entity Z always does Y", they really mean that to the best of our knowledge, entity Z always does Y. The Confortian theist, on the other hand, really does mean "entity Z always does Y", which is one of the biggest problems I have with theism. When confronted with a skeptic, a comfortian theist admits he cannot know for sure, but then insists that he does.