Reppert's XYZ Question

Victor Reppert presents a challenge to everyone concerning the question of what constitutes evidence.  He states it this way:

It goes like this. X is evidence for Y just in case Z.

I've answered the question here at various times, and people are dissatisfied with my answer. Fine. I want to know your XYZ answer. If you are going to tell me I don't have any evidence, then apparently you have a different answer to the XYZ question than I do. But when I ask people what their answer is, I never find out.

Presumably, he wants people to provide some substitution for Z such that it makes a reasonable definition of 'evidence'.  Now this is a topic that he has written about before in his article Victor Reppert on the No Evidence Charge.  His own answer is "X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y."  This may sound reasonable on its face, but it leads people down the wrong path before they ever have a chance to address the question of "What is evidence?"

On Militant Atheism

What does it mean to be militant atheist?  This is the adjective that is increasingly in vogue among Christians these days when applied to vocal atheists.  The word is defined in Merriam Webster as "having or showing a desire or willingness to use strong, extreme, and sometimes forceful methods to achieve something".  So the term "militant atheism" seems to imply the use some kind of undue coercive measures to remove religion from society against the will of believers.  It is therefore pejorative.  A distinction is drawn between the ordinary atheist, who is tolerated, and the militant atheist, who is seen as a plague upon society.  The ordinary atheist remains meek and silent, and poses no threat.  If he speaks up at all, it is only with deferential respect.  The militant atheist, on the other hand, says what he thinks, and in so doing, threatens to ruin everything for the believer.  And what is his method of forcing his odious beliefs upon the rest of the world?  Free speech.

Republican Support for the Earned Income Tax Credit

Wealthy Republicans say they hate socialism.  They despise anything that smacks of "redistribution of wealth".  That's why they hate any kind of taxation.  A person should be able to keep the money he earns, they say.  And government should be small.  Many believe that the only legitimate function of government is to defend the country, and protect life and property.  The purest of the capitalists will even say that there should be no public roads and schools.  Private businesses can provide such things, and do it more efficiently than government.  People who need to use roads or educate their children would pay only for what they use, and nothing more.

But even most Republicans understand that this Randian model is unrealistic.  Government must play a role in providing infrastructure and services that are part of a thriving economy.  Republicans support government to the extent that it helps them to prosper.  They need roads and bridges and other infrastructure elements to get their goods to market.  So rather than paying for it themselves, they support taxpayer-funded infrastructure.  When it comes to schools, they would prefer to send their own children to private schools, but it sure would be nice if they could get the taxpayers to pay for that too, so they support voucher programs that take money from public schools and hand it over it to them so they don't have to pay their own tuition bills for private education.

Avoiding Confirmation Bias

I was a bit surprised to see that Victor Reppert took a defensive stance in response (I believe) to my previous post, in which I said that he seized upon a certain article that appealed to his confirmation bias.  Victors words were:

It seems to me that the defense of any position can be attributed  to confirmation by its opponents. It is a charge that proves everything, and therefore nothing. - Reppert 

He seems to think that the accusation of confirmation bias was used to refute his argument, but since anyone can be accused of having confirmation bias, it is a meaningless charge.  What's surprising to me is his failure to grasp what it means to say that someone has confirmation bias, and that he would see this as a refutation.  So let me try to set the record straight.

The Lie That Never Dies: Christian Apologetics

It is amusing to see Christian apologists like Victor Reppert seize upon any any article they find on the internet that appeals to their confirmation bias.  One topic that Christians have been touchy about is the idea that the church played a large role in the suppression if intellectual pursuit during the historical period known as the Dark Ages.  If you're a Christian apologist, you'd rather believe that there was no such thing as the Dark Ages.  You'd rather believe that intellectual endeavors flourished under the benevolent leadership of the church, and life for the average citizen was just peachy.  There is no shortage of revisionist literature that supports this.  In his customary manner, Victor has uncritically latched onto a review of James Hannam's book God's Philosophers that supports this notion.

The Old Thermodynamics Canard

How frustrating is it to confront someone whose understanding of scientific principles is conditioned on his religious belief?  Just as religious faith is immune to being disputed by any evidence or logic, so too are the false understandings of the workings of nature that the theist employs in his web of self-delusion to rationalize his belief in things that have no basis in reality.  It is one of the mainstays of creationist pseudo-science that the second law of thermodynamics rules out any possibility of life emerging from a chemical primordial soup, or of living things evolving to more complex forms.  The creationist will insist that science is in his favor.  But he is profoundly wrong.

Turning Atheism Into a Religion

It is perhaps the worst kind of insult that a Christian can inflict upon an atheist to say that his atheism is a religion.  You hear it all the time, like here and here.  "Atheism is just as much a religion as Christianity."  "I don't have enough faith to be an atheist," they say.

What makes theists so anxious to characterize atheists as being religious?  It certainly isn't a desire to make us sound noble or virtuous.  Their objective is the opposite of that.  What they are trying to do is to make it sound as if we are irrational and unreasonable, and they do it by telling us we are just the same as them.  They are really making an admission that religion is dogmatic and based on authoritarian dictates.  They are declaring that faith really is belief not based in evidence.  And by accusing atheists of these things, they accuse us of intellectual transgressions, just like the ones that they live by.

Defending Bertrand Russell

What caused God?  To ask this question is to reveal yourself as horrendously ignorant and philosophically illiterate.  The sophisticated philosopher, whether theist or atheist, will assume that you are one of those

atheists who think “What caused God?” is some kind of “Gotcha” question for theists, as if they had never considered such objections before. - Lowder

This uncharitable interpretation applies whether you are just some stupid GNU like Richard Dawkins, or a highly regarded philosopher like David Hume or Bertrand Russell.  They're all ignorant for thinking that there is merit in asking a question like that.  Of course sophisticated philosophers of religion have considered this question and provided sophisticated answers.  But have they really answered in a way that settles the issue?  Maybe some of us just aren't satisfied with the answers we hear.  Maybe there's some justification in continuing to ask the question after all.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Philosophers who favor a supernatural or dualistic view of mind have contrived an argument that they think poses a major obstacle to physicalism.  It is the so-called hard problem of consciousness, that claims there is an unbridgable gap between physical substance and mental substance.  It is basically the claim that the stuff of conscious experience - the qualia, or qualitative component of consciousness - the texture of our perceptions - cannot be explained in terms of physical substances and phenomena.  But this is an unscientific argument.  It amounts to an argument from ignorance.  It is saying that because we don't yet know how to fully explain consciousness in terms of physical matter and its properties, then there must be something immaterial about it.  This fallacy gives courage to those (especially theists) who choose to ignore the track record of naturalistic science, and instead posit the existence of things like the immaterial soul as the answer to the problem.

The Political Correctness of the Right

A favorite target of right-wing wrath is political correctness (PC), and and its supposed practitioners, who are referred to as social justice warriors (SJW).  Political correctness is a pejorative term that denotes the tendency to limit speech so as not to offend any particular group of people, such as minorities, nationalities, or disadvantaged people.  It is often embraced by young, liberal-minded people, especially college students.  In many cases, they have taken it to extremes by instituting overbearing campus speech codes and stifling free expression.  In the worst cases, people have lost their careers for saying things that fall afoul of the SJWs.  These extreme cases give conservatives some legitimate reason to heap scorn upon liberal PC and the SJWs, and I agree with them, up to a point.

However, many on the right tend to see things as black or white.  PC is viewed as a phenomenon of the strictly left-wing, atheist, anti-moral, low-intelligence freedom haters.  It stands in opposition to all that is good and moral.  It's us against conservative ideals.  I've always felt that one of the biggest reasons they have such scorn for PC is that their own (typically religiously motivated) hateful or bigoted sentiments are often held up by the SJWs as being politically incorrect.  In response, many right-wingers will take the very worst examples of PC, and claim that these views are representative of anyone who is liberal or irreligious.