Debate with a Van Tillian presuppositionalist

Recently on my post titled the “Arguments against the existence of God“, Tyler Wittman commented like this: 

Atheists are as real as Chewbacca. The viability of any worldview is if it can be consistently applied and atheism fails the moment you appeal to science (which depends upon uniformity of certain laws), or trust your cognitive faculties, or hold to any moral standard, or place value upon your existence . . . I could go on, but I won’t.

Another “atheist” blog amongst hundreds . . . Nietzsche was the most convincing atheist, from the standpoint that he truly drank his own kool-aid.

I replied:

Christians are as real as Atheists. The viability of any worldview is if it corresponds with reality, and Christianity fails the moment you appeal to natural disasters, unjustified human suffering…I could go on, but I won’t.

Another Christian “drive-by” amongst hundreds… Some Christians even drank the real kool-aid  at Jonestown.

(P.S: I can make infinite internally consistent worldviews).

To which he has replied this:

You refer to theodicy, which is not an issue that is insurmountable. It all depends upon your preconditions for belief that you’ve already established before you approach the suffering or the disaster in question. Neither am I referring to an internally consistent worldview. I believe to make sense of any other worldview, you borrow from the Christian one.

I will not labor to set out the views here in detail, but I will provide you with a personal story from one of my favorites (whom Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris would all have done better to have read before producing such short-sighted efforts of their own – in particular Dawkins; his 747 argument is embarassing), Cornelius Van Til:http://www.reformed.org/apologetics/why_I_believe_cvt.html

It is lengthy and you may not read the entire thing, but I have pointed you the right way, I believe. Here is a snippet to pique your interests:

“I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy.”

The internet is an inadequate medium for these discussions in the first place because they are impersonal and the acceptance or rejection of Christianity is a serious matter that extends beyond the blasse discussion blogs offer. I apologize for my “drive-by.” I hope that I have atoned for it.

I couldn’t write a reply to this because if I go ahead to debate against every argument in the encyclopedia of Van Tillian presuppositionalism, I wouldn’t win any converts. Instead all I would have done is to prove myself and me alone, that within huge haystack of rational arguments and philosphical jargon lies the truth; that presuppositionalist apologetics is wrong

So herein lies my dilemma: what must I do if I am debating such an apologist in front of a group of potential de-converts? If I engage my opponent who hides his unjustified belief behind a huge pile of pseudo- justifications, I would put my potential de-converts to sleep easily. Or worse, they look at how my opponent sounds without understanding anything he has said to conclude that he is write because he uses complicated sounding words and must know what he is talking about. On the other hand, If I do not engage him it would be easily mistaken by my potential de-converts that I do not have an answer, and so I am wrong.

It is amazing to see the lengths to which Christianity goes against unbelief.

Conclusion: Winning converts is not same as winning against apologists. An unbeliever must not try to satisfy the ego-maniacal need to win a debate. He must instead focus on keeping his replies as short and jargon free as possible while responding to the claims by the apologist. An unbeliever must not let the apologist digress behind piles of jargon or long anecdotes.

An unbeliever must use ideas that are within the grasp of the audience. For example, talking about malaria is better than talking about human suffering.

Cube

This philosophical teleplay covers many themes such as, the nature of reality, individual versus scientific perception, self-reference, man’s relation to others and society, insanity, social projections, and race relations. It originally aired on NBC’s weekly anthology television show NBC Experiment in Television February 23, 1969. The production was produced and directed by Jim Henson, and was one of several experiments with the live-action film medium which he conducted in the 1960s, before focusing entirely on the Muppets and other puppet works. The screenplay was co-written by long-time Muppet writer Jerry Juhl (who also appears in a cameo). If you are interested, here is a yahoo group devoted to this film: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JImHensonTheCube/

more about “Cube“, posted with vodpod

Love & Nightmare

I woke up at 6:30 AM (after going to sleep only at 2:30 AM) from an ominous dream involving the girl I have a one-sided love for. This is the first nightmare with her in it, so I am totally irrationally scared.

The dream is in first person mode. It starts off in a bedroom very much like mine and I am sleeping. I am pretending to be sleeping because I know she is in the room. She is wearing a modest white frock with black designs on it. From my lying down on the bed I can see the skirt as it reaches down just below her knees and she is waiting and walking back and forth. She is clearly stressed out by something. I can see that she has documented every communication she has had with everyone of the other boys who had a crush on her. There are so many of them, so she has some kind of library style numbering for each memory.

I can see file G 9 of her diary/scrapbook and it is an email from one of my professors requesting her to please stop playing silent on me because I am so depressed because she doesnt respond to me. She hasn’t replied to that email from my professor, but this is scary because my professor doesn’t know about her and I am wondering how this happened. And I see her on notes in G 9 that say the she knows my parents asked my professor to email her… and I realize she has made this note to herself with some amount of contempt.

She is still waiting for something and at times she sits on something while not walking back and forth. She is sad and stressed about some memory and she wants me to feel the pain and that is why she delibrately doesn’t respond to anything I write and she doesn’t talk to me (unlike the way she was talkative in prior dreams).

She now knows I am waking up, she is waiting, but I am slow. So she pokes me on my left arm and walks away while I wake up into reality.

After I woke up I quickly wrote an email apologizing for every stress I have caused for her (which I did by sending her countless emails, smses and unanswered calls) and I asked her to seek help if something else is troubling her. I told her that she is still the nicest person in the world, but if anything is troubling her she should seek help because all of are only human and that nobody expects to be anything more than that.

I’m really tired after visiting her pensieve. I think I will sleep now.

Reverence

I had a really spiritual experience today while studying enzyme catalysis mechanisms. The feeling of everything that is me and what is out there… all those events happening in high entropy but yet with a hell lot of determinism.

I thought about the absence of God, and how well it fits to the wonder and awe I see in the universe contrasted with total indifference of the universe to our struggles for survival. I reflected about the total arrogance of the religious, in claiming to know everything about someone so complex and hence improbable.. and claiming that, that somebody is so emotionally sensitive to our blasphemies like a little kid and needs tax-exempt pocket money to buy lightning rods that stop his random wrath from hitting his extravagant buildings.

Now is all we have and it will all be forgotten soon. The joy and oneness I experience now is from from study of what can be verified from evidence. It better evidence that what we used to punish people with death.

Exams are next week.

My Pocket Slippery Slope Argument

The powers that be have been very busy lately, falling over each other to position themselves for the game of the century. It is of no doubt that this will be defining period in the history of our species. I can see it brewing.

Religion (Islam) will no doubt play an important role in this. I wouldn’t be surprised if relevant centers of western civilization go under the control of Islam. Call it a remnant of my superstitious past, but I do believe this would happen.

Most of us will pretend everything is just fine, and will slowly boil into oblivion. This slippery slope will turn out to be real.

The Twin Paradox

A pair of twins are usually born within a few minutes of each other. It is not unusual to find one individual of one such pair, who died in accident but the other of old age. I am sure it would not be unusual either, to find a pair in which one won a lottery but the other did not. It would be very easy to find twins with profoundly different lives and fates.

How will an astrologer explain this? Most astrologers, make their predictions based on the times of birth which are far from being accurate to the minute. And by their own admission, astrology works because of the influence of certain celestial bodies being at a certain region in the skies which wide enough to give similar fates to people who were born in the same time although separated by a few minutes.

When this paradox, proposed as challenge to astrologers, they will once again do what what every proponent of pseudo-science does: They will move the “goal post”. I bet they will conjecture a new criterion; something along the lines of how a few minutes can make a lot of difference. 

I’ve had proponents tell me that astrology does not work properly because the exact moment of conception is what matters. But when the “Twin Paradox” is posed to them, they are sure to make up another reason to counter it.

I strongly believe that a poor hypothesis needs to do fast footwork to avoid falsification – to maintain the appearance of a ‘fit’.

Is Chemistry, a religion?

I was attending my Organic Chemistry lecture here today, and lecturer Dr. Yu, Yixin reminded us of the sp³, sp², sp hybridization. I was surprised when I was told that one electron from the 2s orbital gets promoted to 2p_z orbitals to give 4 identically shaped sp³ hybrid orbitals, oriented along the vertices of a tetrahedron.According to Aufbau principle, 2p_z has a higher energy than a 2s. Where does this extra energy to promote one electron from the 2s orbital to 2p_z come from? I asked Dr. Yu whether Carbon has to be heated or something to make it hybridized, and he thinks, no. He admitted that it is just an explanation of what happens, and that there is no evidence.Then why is it being taught in a textbook?I think the reality of sp³ hybridization is more probabilistic than the “deterministic” “digital” explanation given in the textbooks. Since we are dealing with probabilities of electrons around the nucleus it is likely (less than 90% chance) that one electron from the 2s orbital is in the 2p_z orbital at times, and it is only during those times Carbon acquires a hybridized state. So in its ground state, Carbon shifts between hybridized and non-hybridized states.But that temporary hybridization would be enough for it form methane molecules with 4 identical tetrahedrally arranged covalent bonds with Hydrogen’s 1s electrons. And once the methane is formed, it acquires a low energy state in which the Carbon atom inside the methane molecule is permanently in a hybridized form.So my hypothesis is that, the probability of Carbon being in a hybridized state must be accounted for in an All Atom Quantum Mechanical simulations of Organic Chemistry. Because it would dramatically affect the yield of methane synthesis, and just about every other organic reaction.

Youtube Comments

Source

Kids say the darndest things

I found these bad analogies written by high school students on the internet. My favorites are in italics:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Keep out of reach of adults

Kids are tired of hearing adults say, “Why don’t you just try it? You can’t know you don’t like something unless you try it.”

Yes, they are tired of it.

I know the only known defense to the “try it” position. It’s guaranteed to work. And it goes like this:

• ANNOYING PARENT:“Why won’t you try these peas? You can’t know you don’t like something until you try it.”
• KID: “Why don’t you go out to the back yard, find a nice frozen dog turd and use it as a Popsicle? You can’t know you don’t like it unless you try it. Unless you would be willing to admit that there are some things you DO know you don’t like before you try them.”

Next week I’ll teach you how to spend all your free time playing video games and not taking out the garbage. If you feel that you love me now, you can call me Uncle Ed.