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The game of quidditch from the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling is depicted as an exciting sport to watch and to play. Played while riding on magic brooms, it is fast-paced, requires speed and coordination, and relies on teamwork and individual creativity. It is depicted as a tough sport, not for the fainthearted.
And, as we all know, it is a fictional sport. In the end, quidditch, like Harry Potter, is not real. It is simply the product of an active and creative imagination.
We know it is a fantasy because we all intuitively understand the basic principles of our universe. Even for the more imaginative of us, it is obvious brooms cannot defy gravity, no matter what make or model. Rowling’s boy-wizard is fantasy, and quidditch is a fantasy sport, regardless of our personal perceptions. Whether we are an agnostic or an atheist, a deist or a theist, we can all distinguish between the fantasy of quidditch and the reality of actual sports.
But when things are not quite as clear as this example, things get a little strange. And, often, attitudes and arguments abound. For example, in matters of morality or politics or religion, people often react passionately and vigorously about what is true and what is good. And, in many ways, such reactions are appropriate.
For these are matters of significance and import. These are not life’s trivialities. They are the sum and substance of this life and the future, even eternity. These issues also reach down into the very core of life and living and to the center of all human beings. They have far-reaching effects for our being and for life and how it is to be lived. Being contentious around important issues such as politics, morality and religion is often necessary, provided we contend with others fairly, honestly and lovingly.
So, in such areas, separating the imaginable from the real, separating fantasy from reality is crucial. It is crucial to everyone’s search for truth. It is crucial because we need to know what life is really all about and how to live it. And it is crucial so we may act purposefully and with confidence, knowing we are doing the right thing and seeing things as they really are.
And it is just here that we situate some of the crucial, irreconcilable differences between atheism and Catholicism. For both beliefs have vast implications stretching out into the reaches of human society, human relations and into the deep recesses of each and every human heart. And these differences make all the difference.
When it comes to separating fantasy from reality, these differences are critical to so many aspects of life and living. For instance, these differences are crucial for how we understand human nature and consciousness, crucial to how we understand how we know things, how we reason, and how we know the rules and principles of reason itself.
Let’s take a brief look at human consciousness and reason in closer detail. There are basically two ways of looking at human consciousness. One is called monism. It means human consciousness is comprised of one thing. It means human consciousness is only physical, a product of the material world only. Monism sees all aspects of human consciousness as physical, biochemical events. Our personality, our will, our reason, our thoughts, our emotions, our morality are solely the product of neural activity, a collective concert of biochemical events in our brain that create these many psychological and cognitive experiences.
For monists, every human experience we have is merely the byproduct of brain activity. Our sensations of who we are, our thoughts, our emotional experiences, our sense of beauty, our sense of morality, our sense of proportionality, our deliberations and decisions, our intuitions, our common sense — everything we experience, everything we hold dear — are utterly and simply illusions generated by collective cellular events. Nothing more.
The other basic way of looking at all that is entailed in human consciousness is “dualism.” The dualistic view recognizes both the tangible dimension of biochemistry, as well as the intangible dimension of the human mind. Dualism blends the material and the mental realms of human experience and links them interactively as we experience them. Dualism sees the interplay of the physical and the mental as a seamless integration, a harmony of these interrelated states.
For dualists, human consciousness has both a mental dimension as well as a physical one. And all our human experiences are real human experiences, not just a composite of collective neural activity. Our reason is actually real, as are our thoughts, our emotions, our intuitions. We have an intangible soul that is real, as real as our bodies and our brains.
Monists believe everything we experience as human beings is solely and entirely based on physical processes. Our consciousness is an experience that is only real to us and is entirely contingent on biochemical activity. Dualists believe human beings are a combination of the tangible and intangible. We are both physical and mental beings. We have bodies and souls, and both are equally real.
For monists, everything we experience isn’t what it seems, for everything is a neural mirage. For dualists, everything we experience has an actual reality. For monist,s separating fantasy from reality is difficult because our consciousness is a series of neural illusions. In a sense, everything we experience is a fantasy, either a neural fantasy with some degree of correspondence to the outside world or a mental fantasy, akin to imaginative fantasy. For dualists, separating fantasy from reality is much easier because we know human consciousness is real and can recognize not only physical certainty and accuracy, but mental ones, as well.
For monists, all human consciousness is like a dream. For dualists, dreams are just dreams. For monists, death is the end of the body and the absolute destruction of our dream-like consciousness. Existence was an illusion and death is the end of the illusion. For dualists, death is the separation of the mental from the physical. We are no longer bound by our body because we are more than just our bodies.
For monists, reason has no real reality other than how it is experienced. For dualists, reason has a reality unto itself and can be understood better with training and use. For monists, it is difficult to explain reasoning and reason itself beyond the mapping of brain activity because these are mere neural sensations. For dualists, reasoning is real and can be evaluated against the laws and principles of reason itself.
Now, in fairness to monists, they don’t really live their life as if everything was a mirage. They generally live lives like most of us, within the bounds of common sense, reason and science. But their view of human consciousness does not justify or explain their ordinary, daily living. It is a view of consciousness that is impractical and inaccurate, as even their daily lives attest.
For most monists move easily and practically, blending the physical and the mental planes, living comfortably in the tangible and intangible worlds where emotions and reason are as real as radishes and railroads. It is just that their worldview does not correspond well to their daily lives and practical living.
And it is just here that their monism is not something that is actually livable or conceptually viable. It is a theoretical concept that offers an explanation for all reality that is virtually unlivable, unless you “pretend” the intangible aspects are real. Not only is it unlivable, but irrational, as well. For it eliminates reason itself, as well as a host of common, practical human experiences. In the end, monism sees everything as one thing and one thing only. And, therefore, it explains nothing. Or, at least, nothing more than the obvious.
Despite these differences between practical living and theory, there are many atheists, including the more prominent heralds, who have either an explicit or implicit monistic view of human consciousness. And, when you speak with such atheists, even if the conversation about God never turns toward the subject of human consciousness, you can hear their implicit monism in their demand for physical proof of God’s existence or their resistance to arguments on moral or aesthetic grounds or in their zealous insistence on physical evidence alone.
This is why philosophical arguments carry little weight in discussions with some atheists: because of their implicit monistic bias about the nature of evidence and their assumptions about our ability to actually know anything. This is odd, given their allegiance to science and their inability to properly attribute to reason its crucial place in the scientific method and its pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Given the importance of reason to any argument or even for science itself, for monists, reason does not have quite the credibility or power to make the case, even for familiar intangible realities, let alone God. And with those atheists who actually think in a manner that is consistent with their monistic beliefs, they know human reason has no real reality unless it is legitimized in the physical realm. Otherwise, reason is regarded with some suspicion and is impotent, unless linked to science.
But Catholicism maintains the reality of the tangible, physical universe, as well as the intangible, mental and spiritual plane. Catholics believe all that exists physically is the product of the divine Spirit — God. Catholics believe the spiritual plane precedes the existence of the physical realm and that the supreme Spirit brought the physical plane into existence. Unlike the atheists, Catholics believe the spiritual and mental planes are real. Most atheists don’t. To many of them, it is just biochemistry.
Well, when it comes to truth, such distinctions are helpful. These differences are clear and mutually exclusive. Not only that, they also cover the entire range of choices within their beliefs. Many atheists claim the physical realm is the single, sole source of our human consciousness and experiences. Catholics claim the spiritual, emotional and intellectual dimensions are equally as real as the physical ones.
When we examine these claims, we know one of these beliefs must be true and the other false. Either the monistic atheist is right or the dualistic Catholic is right. Either human experience is solely a product of biochemical activity, a composite of cellular, neural events, or human experience is more than the biochemistry we can see.
And, in the end, only one view, one belief, can be true. The other is a fantasy. No matter how appealing, no matter how much we prefer it, only one can be true; only one can be real. The other must be a fantasy, a fabrication, a phony, fictitious faith.
And, the bottom line is: If we Catholics are right, we are left with the fact that our mental, emotional and spiritual experiences are as real as our physical ones — our everyday lives and our eventual immortality is evident even now in the reality of our personality and perceptions, our reasoning and our emotions, our morality and our sense of beauty, our intuitions and our common sense, as well as in the magnificence and order and complexity of the world in which we live.
If we Catholics are right, we can know the difference between fantasy and fact, between mirage and reality. But, if the monistic atheists are right, we only have the singular and solitary fact of biochemistry. All else is fantasy. And, as it turns out, everything is the equivalent of quidditch, a fiction and a fantasy. Even our knowledge of this fantasy is a fantasy, too. Sounds like science fiction, not science, don’t you think?
(Part 1 and Part 2 of the series can be found here and here. Next: Atheism and Multiple-Choice Truth.)
Frank Cronin, formerly an avowed atheist, writes from eastern Connecticut. He has a master’s degree in theology from Regent University. His post-master’s study includes Harvard, Columbia and Holy Apostles College and Seminary. He was received into the Catholic Church in 2007.
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Extraordinary claims require Extraordinary Evidence.
Without Evidence your claims that there is a *supreme omnimax god* hold the same weight as someone claiming Quidditch is a reality.
The first three paragraphs make you sound like a reasonable person.
The remainder doesn’t. Religous truth-claims are no different to other truth-claims, except that they’re unsupported by evidence. For all of your dualist musings, no soul has ever been found.
Essentially, religion is quidditch - for some people it’s an enjoyable fantasy. But I question the mental health and critical faculties of anybody who takes it seriously.
Yeah and Kieran, you guys are silly. If I take your claims, I end up with nihilism or fatalism. If evidence is your only need to believe something, you must ask yourself “why is evidence even needed?”
Silliness ;)
I’m an atheist with some sympathy for both Catholicism and dualism, but I don’t find this argument or characterization of monism compelling. My response is a little long for a combox so I spun it off into a post (Dualism and Descartes’s Demon, http://www.unequally-yoked.com/2011/09/dualism-and-descartess-demon.html) but, in essence: Everyone, whichever metaphysical side they pick, has to find a way to manage the untrustworthiness of our senses. The fact that some stimuli let us ‘cheat’ and induce certain reactions doesn’t mean that nothing can be a valid cause for a certain emotion.
So, Jared, your argument is not that your religion is true, since you make no attempt to establish that. Instead, you argue that it’s desirable. Of course, if it’s not true it doesn’t matter whether it’s desirable. The assertion that evidence isn’t necessary is an intellectual cop-out - nothing more than attempt to justify the belief in obvious lies.
It’s a lovely bald statement that atheism is necessary nihilism. It’s infantile to think that any meaning in life has to be provided for you ready-made. I’m more than happy to find meaning in my family, my wife, my friends and all of the beauty (natural and man-made) that the world has to offer.
I would counter that people who behave well because it’s the right thing to do are good people; those who do the right thing because of a promise of eternal rewards or a threat of eternal punishment are merely obsequious sycophants. If the only reason you’re not killing and stealing is a pronouncement in a bronze age text then you are a bad person and I’d be well advised to keep my distance.
Frankly, if there is a god who resembles the execrable character described in the bible, I’m more than happy to side with the honourable opposition.
I will pose one question: if you get your morality from the bible, how do you determine that “thou shalt not kill” is a good piece of moral advice, and “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” is not?
Let’s start by noting that most modern philosophers and neuroscientists have discarded dualism due to its many problems: How does mind interact with matter? Why can brain scans determine what people will decide seconds before they are conscious of making a decision? If the brain is just a “relay station” for the soul, why do changes to the brain (by drugs or damage) change people’s personality and actions? Where in evolutionary history, as well as in fetal development, does the soul appear? Furthermore, why does Frank Cronin make the unsupported and unwarranted assumptions that thoughts and feelings are illusory and insignificant unless they have a non-material basis, and that non-material mental faculties would necessarily be more reliable than material ones (everything dualists think they know about the non-material world wouldn’t fill a sheet of paper - how do we know that non-material reasoning is reliable?). Also, assuming the existence of non-material beings like gods or demons opens for the possibility that our entire reality is an illusion created by a malicious non-material being.
Even your monism has its roots in reality. What if every mental phenomenon, and by extension “reality” itself is just a biophysical event? Well, biophysical events don’t begin and end in our brains. It’s clear from our ever-expanding understanding of environmentalism that our material selves are swimming in wider and wider circles of physical reality, all of which affects us to a greater or lesser degree - extending out no doubt to the farthest ranging galaxies. The biophysical influences on our consciousness therefore reach us from (near) eternity. The fact that monists’ interior illusion corresponds with common-sense reality (enough for them to function) demonstrates an overarching principle of order reaching from infinity into their rather limited material existences; one that spans the nanotechnology of neurons and the gravitational pull of the universe itself. Don’t you think?
Creation by Satan ? Nasty LOL - but it would explain a lot of things. If Satan is Lord of the Universe, “Master of Darkness, King of Death”, all the bad stuff makes sense - all the good stuff would then be for the sake of cheating people into thinking the Supreme Power was good. But I don’t think this site is the best place to preach Satanolatry
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@Kieran:
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“I will pose one question: if you get your morality from the bible, how do you determine that “thou shalt not kill” is a good piece of moral advice, and “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” is not?”
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That “if” is unfounded - Catholics asre not Biblical Fundamentalists - we read the Bible within an interpretative tradition; which gives the theological priorities that govern the degree of importance we give to the various items in the Biblical text. For instance,as Christians, we give the NT priority over the OT, from which you’ve quoted. The fact that passages & verses X & Y & Z & A & B & C are all in the Bible, does not for one second imply that they are all of equal value, importance, relevance, or reliability at all times and in all situations & for all readers. Ther is so much that could be said about this - it’s a very complex and interesting question - but I hope that helps.
Kieran, I didn’t know you were an atheist, so your thought that I assume atheism leads to nihilism is jumpy. My comment was based on the need for evidence. Am I copping out? Did you provide an answer for why you have decided evidence is required and unevidence is not? Of course not, for we both know that it takes a leap of faith to believe that we should trust reason. I believe in reason because I believe in an ordered and created universe. But your need of evidence begs the question and in circles we go. And please, let’s not get into my belief in an ancient myth, atheism is as old. We also both know age doesn’t prove anything except that we are one day closer to see the consequence of our Pascal’s Wager.
Regarding your virtues of family life, etc.; that is wonderful and we share in common love of family and wife.
Ok, the comment at 11:41 on September 14 was mine, I have no idea why it says Kieren posted it. Strange. I did post it from my iPhone, so maybe that is why.
Kieran, your claim that religion is an uncritical, insupportable fantasy is a common misconception of the “scientific classes,” who are imprisoned in their own type of religion. The Christian religion is based on historical facts which are lived out in the life and experience of the faithful down to this day. If this were not the case, how would religion survive? Any world views based on fantasy and falsehood would necessarily shrivel up, as has marxism in our day. The enduring power of the Christian religion is it’s unique ability to explain a massively inscrutable world - its Truth. On the other hand, “science” is a poor pretender. It’s “truths” change as fast as newspaper headlines. The only thing enduring about “science” is its implicit assertion that Man without God cannot know anything! Certainly the assetion that the human mind can comprehend even the smallest sliver of reality is contradicted by your inability to recognize biblical truth!
Jared,
Just so you know— when you make a comment, the next time you come back to comment, the name you previously entered automatically appears again.
So, if you intend to engage in sock-puppetry, you need to be more careful. ;-)
I’m sorry, I actually should have warned Kieran, the atheist, to be more careful. Jared is just the sock-puppet to help Kieran the atheist look smart and to help his “dialogue” along here.
Silly atheist. ;-)
This is weird. I have no idea who Jared is. I posted at 4:51 and 6:31 and have nothing to do with 11:41.
I’ve scrutinised Matt B’s rantings and can’t find a single line which makes any sense. Particularly amusing is “science is a poor pretender”. Science is the only honest effort we have to explain the world and universe. Religion is making up stuff and telling people you have the absolute truth.
Stephen Hawking was rather more intelligible - “Science will win because it works”. Nobody has demonstrated any power of prayer, the existence of a soul, the existence of a god or the existence of any sort of afterlife. But my computer seems to be working just fine, and my life expectancy is about four times the average in bibilcal times.
@Matt B: Science - “a poor pretender”? That sort of claim just makes us Christians look silly. There is nothing wrong with *science*, the problem arises when those natural scientists who subscribe to the “New Atheism” assume that they are also good philosophers. I hope that made some sort of sense, my English is getting rusty. I just had to react to that ;) God bless
For those athiests who comment here I would like to make a few points.
1) I’m sure that Mr Cronin is merely pointing out some of the problems of physicalism in his posts, he is not attempting a full throated defense of classical thiesm. (he is of course free to correct me)
2)Quoting hume’s dictum “extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence” won’t do, for if God exists then the claim God exists is not extraordiary at all but simply a statement of fact. It all rests on what one belives to be extraordinary, something which will have been influenced by the social context of one’s life.
3)Waving the Evolution Talsiman simply won’t do, for merely to be a valid source of inquiry science must assume certain truths (namely mathmatical, metaphysical and logical)and cannot access others e.g. Historical truths.
4) Anyone who is iterested in a full-throated defense of Classical Theism and Hylemorphic Dualism may be interested in Professor Edward Feser’s “The Last Superstition, A refutation of the New Athiesm” (as a popular introduction which is none the less very complex).
5) May I ask you why you come onto Religious sites and engage in troll like behaviour? Betrand Russel & Quentin Smith to name a few were /are quite capable of questioning the views of their opponents without descending into ad homminem attacks and ridiculous charicatures.
Kieran, I posted at 11:41, but by mistake. I think I entered your name in the “Name” area so that I could remember how to spell your name, your name is not too popular, at least here in the States. Please accept my apology. That particular post was done from my iPhone which is not very conducive to replying anyway.
Now back to your comment. If I use “evidence only” methods of thinking, how do you justify this comment: “Stephen Hawking was rather more intelligible - “Science will win because it works”.”? The is no evidence for future events because they have not happened unless Hawking spent some time in the future and in his off time of being completely blown away from all the futuristic things, he did research on how science wins. This begs the question on why he even used science to prove it, why not unscience? The human person is rational, that is a Christian belief, yet science cannot locate “reason.” They can only see its effects.
Kieran, you’re wrong - “science” can only explain the most mundane and pedestrian of matters. For the really big, important questions you need recourse to faith, because the world of science basically has no idea, and cannot help you. Look at the farce of darwinism, the biggest contender as a potential scientific worldview. It portrays the world as a place where everything is trying to eat everything else. What a horror! and how far removed from authentically human existence. Biblical creationism has far more to say about who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going as men and women. Darwinism is just “an undigested morsel of meat” as Dickens remarks about Scrooge’s bad dream in A Christmas Carol.
@scandinavianrc, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that “science is a poor pretender.” If you want a better microwave oven, or more IT toys to waste your time, or a bridge to take you from one nowhere to another similar nowhere - science is your thing. If you want to know, as a man or a women, how to pursue a life worth living, whether to have few or many children, who to marry, how to allocate your scarce resources, whether to hope or despair, where to put your trust - you need faith and religion. The fact that so many of the goods of science are so overvalued, and the indisputable wealth of faith and religion is virtually ignored, is an apt diagnosis for the (acute) ills of our time, despite Kieran’s feigned incredulity. The question actually arises, can anyone who ignores faith and religion be intelligent enough to fix a microwave, or properly use a smartphone, or design a bridge? Or are they only just cunning monkeys, and capable of nothing worth the attention of a man, his wife and their children? Peace to you!
Religion is terrific if what you need in your life is falsified certainty and answers with no factual basis. GIGO applies to everything…if you can’t demonstrate your basic supernatural claims, any conclusions resulting from that are worse than worthless.
Entertainment can be taken with a grain of salt. But like anything else, such as a person’s love for a sports team or a rock band, it should not consume you.
Everyone needs balance in their life and should learn to from the people and things they are exposed to.
I can listen to a Slayer album and know not to bow to Satan. Slayer’s music tells stories about the darkside of things in life and how many people blame and hate God for things going on. Anyone that takes their lyrical content seriously are just very disturbed. Even Slayer doesn’t even take what they do seriously. It’s agressive music—leave it at that. No one is hurting anyone from listening to a song.
Now when you have someone like Chaz Bono parading around like a man and is exposing it’s lifestyle on network TV (by being on dancing with the stars), now that is wrongful behavior—For Chaz is indeed living a life as an abomination and doing so for all the world to see—along with having much acceptance and airplay by the secular media.
The same with Harry Potter. It is fantasy, an escape for people. I don’t like Harry Potter at all, but enjoy stories found in comic books.
People need a good balance of recreation, faith, family, community and work. If people can find this balance, they’ll be able to live a quality life.
The recurring error in this series of essays is the misrepresentation of the essay’s subject. If you want a better explanation of what monism is, you can go here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10483a.htm I cho.se a Catholic website so that I can’t be accused of linking to a hostile source.
There is nothing about materialism, monism, or atheism that leads one to rejecting reason—not practically, not philosophically, not logically. It just doesn’t follow. There is no reason that a person who rejects the supernatural must also reject all abstract concepts.
It isn’t hard to find naturalistic explanations of emotions and abstract thought. This author didn’t even try.
“There is nothing about materialism, monism, or atheism that leads one to rejecting reason”
—my reply: This I will agree with since ANYONE, no matter of their faith or lack there of, can succumb to the negative impacts of greed, materialism and money. When someone’s ego gets in the way of their moral guidelines, that’s when people get in trouble. However, unlike athiests, at least people that claim to believe in God do have a higher power to fall back on to realize that such thingss as glutony and consuming themselves with too much of anything (alcohol, harry potter books, etc.) is not healthy. Athiests do not have this “truth” to guide them or question their behavior—Just a “good vs. evil” ego and may also base the self-judgement of their behavior of society’s current trends and norms..
Teedy,
You’ve made an empirically testable claim. If people needed a higher power to realize gluttony and addiction are not healthy, then we would see atheists succumbing to gluttony and addiction at higher rates than theists. But that doesn’t happen. Similar claims have been tested before. Atheists don’t succumb to moral failings any more than theists do.
This belief only survives because so many theists can’t understand what a person could base their morality on if not a god. But theists bring non-god-based morality to their own religion all the time. There are all kinds of things in the Bible that you would never do, and it’s not because other parts of the Bible tell you not to. It’s because your secular sense of morality knows the difference between right and wrong.
Prior to distinguishing between monism and dualism, Frank Cronin has already made a fatal error. Suppose the fundamental question of human knowledge is: What is the source of consciousness? The obvious answer is the self. Viola, the philosophy of relativism. Yet, the material world must still be explained within relativism, which leads to monism or dualism, both of which are unsatisfactory. Within relativism, dualism maintains that somehow there is a secondary, and therefore, inexplicable source of human knowledge, namely the material world. The error lies in the beginning in asking the wrong question as I indicated at the end of my essay, “Richard Dawkins’ problem of improbability in The God Delusion: A valid argument for atheism or an error in mathematics?” That essay was printed in the DES Journal. It is accessible on line by using the Bing or Yahoo search engines. The fundamental question of human knowledge is: What is the source of the intelligibility of things? This is the ancient Greek question of the universals, answered by Plato and then definitively by Aristotle.
Yes, monism. There is no evidence that we can separate our experiences from brain function. Therefore, a dualistic notion of mind is wishful thinking. Sure, Renee Descartes was a dualist, but he had absolutely no biological science knowledge, such as the localization of some brain function, the neural circuits that connect different lobes of the brain, and the inhibitory functions of the frontal lobe. The only reason to maintain a dualistic approach to mind is to make way for the spirit, the soul.
The author describes monism, but does he really understand neuroscience? Where does the author obtain his scientific terminology? Could it be that he learned this terminology from a “friend” who clarified that the debate over mind is not “materialism vs. dualism”, but rather “monism vs. dualism”? Could it be that he utilizes interpersonal relationships and friendships as fodder for essay material, without their knowledge or consent?
To the extent that commenters here call for evidence, in my experience the atheistic/agnostic mantra of “there is no evidence” is typically premised upon an arbitrary and subjective definition of evidence. Because evidence is a legal term, and this discipline has written the most about the concept, it would make sense to consider the legal definition of evidence before declaring that there is none. “[E]vidence is defined as ‘all the means by which any alleged matter of fact, the truth of which is submitted to investigation, is established or disproved.’” Forshey v. Principi, 284 F.3d 1335, 1358 (Fed. Cir. 2002). “[E]vidence includes all the means by which any alleged matter of fact is established or disproved, and is further defined as any species of proof legally presented at trial through the medium of witnesses, records, documents, exhibits, concrete objects, etc., for the purpose of inducing belief in the minds of the court or jury.” People v. Victors, 353 Ill. App. 3d 801, 811-812; 819 N.E.2d 311 (2004).
Notice the use of the terms “any” and “all” in these definitions. A whole lot of things count as “evidence.” Testimony is included within the definition of evidence, although it is “not synonymous with evidence” because evidence “is a more comprehensive term.” People v. Victors, supra at 811-812. In other words, personal religious experiences, COUNT AS EVIDENCE as that term has been legally defined, something atheists find hard to accept. This also means that the Gospels, for example - as “records, documents” - fall within the definition of “evidence” as well. Atheists and skeptics may say that these are not reliable forms evidence, but to say there is NO evidence is simply false.
Also, the philosophical evidence for God’s existence (First cause, argument from contingency, argument from reason, moral argument, apparent fine tuning) might not strictly meet the definition of evidence, but the philosophical evidence does - coupled with the existence of the universe and consciousness itself - give rise to a “presumption.” A “presumption” comes about when the “finding of a basic fact gives rise to existence of presumed fact, until [the] presumption is rebutted.” Wilner v. United States, 24 F.3d 1397, 1411 (Fed. Cir. 1994). “Although not evidence, a presumption can be a substitute for evidence if it is not rebutted.” Id. Most atheists will freely admit that they have no evidence disproving God - they usually fall back on the fact that it is not their burden. However, if there is a presumption of God’s existence (and at least 4 1/2 billion people would say there is), then atheists do in fact carry the burden of rebuttal.
Most atheists/skeptics confuse “evidence” with “conclusive evidence,” sometimes termed “conclusive proof,” which is defined as “evidence so strong as to overbear any other evidence to the contrary.” Black’s Law Dictionary 636 (9th ed. 2009). It is also defined as “[e]vidence that so preponderates as to oblige a fact-finder to come to a certain conclusion.” Id. There may not be, in the atheists/skeptics view, evidence that “obliges” them to accept God’s existence. But this does not mean there is no evidence at all, only that he has not seen what he considers to be “conclusive evidence.” Also, note again the first part of Black’s definition - “evidence so strong as to overbear any other evidence to the contrary.” Atheists admittedly have no “evidence to the contrary,” so ANY EVIDENCE AT ALL(i.e., personal religious experience) becomes “conclusive proof” by courtroom standards.
The real issue that needs to be addressed is, what are you, “SM,” Rex, Sandy, Earl and your ilk doing here. There is an increasing level of desperation that is reflected in this practice of coming onto to explicitly Christian websites and trying to evangelize. It is one thing to put your view out there as a philosophical perspective, but if reason and progress is truly on your side, what need is there to go on the offensive? Why troll the writings of particular authors or websites that no one is forcing you to read? Won’t the “truth” lead people to your side eventually, if what you believe is true? The real reason, I suspect, for this militancy is that atheism is, when carried to its logical conclusion, incoherent:
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/higher-things/2011/nov/19/atheism-why-it-logically-incoherent
http://www.catholicthinker.net/the-incoherence-of-atheism/
http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/4-arguments-transcendence.htm
http://www.reasonsforgod.org/the-best-reasons/the-argument-from-reason/
Before anyone wastes too much energy responding to Lewis, do a quick web search for any sentence in his comment above. You will find that his comment is a copy/paste job. I don’t know who the original author is, but you’ll find the first three paragraphs appearing elsewhere on this website and one other. You also find the last paragraph with those four links appearing on this website elsewhere. All of these comments are under different names.
It makes me wonder if the people pasting these comments here have even read the articles they’re linking to. I got suspicious when the first person I saw posting them couldn’t even tell me what the thesis was for any of them.
I’ll make you the same offer that was ignored by the other plagiarist: Tell me which of these articles does the best job of showing atheism to be absurd, and I’ll respond thoroughly and give you something to read and respond to in return.
Deal?
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