Very interesting is this extract from a novel titled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, consisting of Chapter 1 and an Appendix in which the 36 arguments are set out and systematically demolished.

It is the work of an atheist philosopher and novelist named Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.

The 36 arguments are all worth examining to a greater or lesser degree. They have all been examined many times, often at great length. Goldstein’s presentation of them and her neat counter-arguments constitute a masterpiece of precise sufficiency. Only thorough familiarity with the subject matter and long and deep thinking can produce such conciseness and such clarity.

In the counter-arguments, listed as ‘Flaws’, she occasionally reinforces her case with an apt quotation. Having knocked down Argument 11, for instance, The Argument from Miracles, she adds an observation from David Hume which I like: ‘If the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense.’

Number 25 is The Argument from Suffering. This is how she gives it and deals with it:

1. There is much suffering in this world.

2. Some suffering (or at least its possibility) is demanded by human moral agency: if people could not choose evil acts that cause suffering, moral choice would not exist.

3.Whatever suffering cannot be explained as the result of human moral agency must also have some purpose (from 2 & 3).

4. There are virtues — forbearance, courage, compassion, and so on — that can only develop in the presence of suffering. We may call them ‘the virtues of suffering’.

5. Some suffering has the purpose of our developing the virtues of suffering (from 4).

6. Even taking 3 and 6 into account, the amount of suffering in the world is still enormous — far more than what is required for us to benefit from suffering.

7. Moreover, there are those who suffer who can never develop the virtues of suffering–children, animals, those who perish in their agony.

8. There is more suffering than we can explain by reference to the purposes that    we can discern (from 7 & 8).

9. There are purposes for suffering that we cannot discern (from 2 and 9).

10. Only a being who has a sense of purpose beyond ours could provide the purpose of all suffering (from 10).

11. Only God could have a sense of purpose beyond ours.

12. God exists.

To which she answers:

This argument is a sorrowful one, since it highlights the most intolerable feature of our world, the excess of suffering. The suffering in this world is excessive in both its intensity and its prevalence, often undergone by those who can never gain anything from it. This is a powerful argument against the existence of a compassionate and powerful deity.  [Bold added here and throughout]

While I agree with her that every one of the arguments fails to prove the existence of God, I do not agree with all her contentions. For example, here is number 27, The Argument from The Upward Curve of History:

1. There is an upward moral curve to human history (tyrannies fall; the evil side loses in major wars; democracy, freedom, and civil rights spread).

2. Natural selection’s favoring of those who are fittest to compete for resources and mates has bequeathed humankind selfish and aggressive traits.

3. Left to their own devices, a selfish and aggressive species could not have ascended up a moral curve over the course of history (from 2).

4.Only God has the power and the concern for us to curve history upward.

5. God exists.

And here is the ‘Flaw’ as she sees it:

Though our species has inherited traits of selfishness and aggression, we have also inherited capacities for empathy, reasoning, and learning from experience. We have also inherited language, and with it a means to pass on the lessons we have learned from history. And so humankind has slowly reasoned its way toward a broader and more sophisticated understanding of morality, and more effective institutions for keeping peace. We make moral progress as we do scientific progress, through reasoning, experimentation, and the rejection of failed alternatives.

The sentence I have italicized is more a description of civilization than of moral progress in the heart or mind of the species. The idea of moral progress through human history is dubious, even when seen as a learning process rather than an evolutionary one. She does not discuss what it is that makes us behave morally. While she implicitly rejects the idea that God does, she does not introduce enlightened self-interest. Of course, such a discussion is not her immediate purpose. But it is a more efficient destruction of the argument to deny that there is any ‘upward curve  of history’ in the sense that mankind has become nicer, and she makes no convincing case that there is such a thing.

She makes a very good argument against Pascal’s Wager in number 32, The Argument from Decision Theory, ending with this analogy:

Say I told you that a fire-breathing dragon has moved into the next apartment and that unless you set out a bowl of marshmallows for him every night he will force his way into your apartment and roast you to a crisp. According to Pascal’s wager, you should leave out the marshmallows. Of course you don’t, even though you are taking a terrible risk in choosing not to believe in the dragon, because you don’t assign a high enough probability to the dragon’s existence to justify even the small inconvenience.

Number 32 is The Argument from Pragmatism, William James’s ‘leap of faith’.

1. The consequences for the believer’s life of believing should be considered as part of the evidence for the truth of the belief (just as the effectiveness of a scientific theory in its practical applications is considered evidence for the truth of the theory). Call this the pragmatic evidence for the belief.

2. Certain beliefs effect a change for the better in the believer’s life — the necessary condition being that they are believed.

3. The belief in God is a belief that effects a change for the better in a person’s life.

4. If one tries to decide whether or not to believe in God based on the evidence available, one will never get the chance to evaluate the pragmatic evidence for the beneficial consequences of believing in God (from 2 and 3).

5. One ought to make ‘the leap of faith’ (the term is James’s) and believe in God, and only then evaluate the evidence (from 1 and 4).

Of her refutations here the one I like best (though I’m not saying it is stronger than the others) is this:

Why should we only consider the pragmatic effects on the believer’s life? What about the effects on everyone else? The history of religious intolerance, including inquisitions, fatwas, and suicide bombers, suggests that the effects on one person’s life of another person’s believing in God can be pretty grim.

An important case is made in number 33, The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason, that ‘our belief in reason cannot be justified by reason, since that would be circular’ so ‘our belief in reason must be accepted on faith’.  Of her counter-arguments here, I particularly liked these:

[T]o justify reason with reason is not circular, but rather, unnecessary. One already is, and always will be, committed to reason by the very process one is already engaged in, namely reasoning. Reason is non-negotiable; all sides concede it. It needs no justification, because it is justification. A belief in God is not like that at all.

And:

If one really took the unreasonability of reason as a license to believe things on faith, then which things should one believe in? If it is a license to believe in a single God who gave his son for our sins, why isn’t it just as much a license to believe in Zeus and all the other Greek gods, or the three major gods of Hinduism, or the angel Moroni? For that matter, why not Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy? If one says that there are good reasons to accept some entities on faith, while rejecting others, then one is saying that it is ultimately reason, not faith, that must be invoked to justify a belief.

And then there is the most interesting argument of them all to atheists, number 35, The Argument from the Intelligibility of the World – ‘Spinoza’s God’.

Whenever Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he responded that he believed in “Spinoza’s God.” This argument presents Spinoza’s God. It is one of the most elegant and subtle arguments for God’s existence, demonstrating where one ends up if one rigorously eschews the Fallacy of Invoking One Mystery to Pseudo-Explain Another: one ends up with the universe, and nothing but the universe: a universe which itself provides all the answers to all the questions one can pose about it. A major problem with the argument, however, in addition to the flaws discussed below, is that it is not at all clear that it is God whose existence is being proved. Spinoza’s conclusion is that the universe that is described by the laws of nature simply is God. Perhaps the conclusion should, rather, be that the universe is different from what it appears to be — no matter how arbitrary and chaotic it may appear, it is in fact perfectly lawful and necessary, and therefore worthy of our awe. But is its awe-inspiring lawfulness reason enough to regard it as God? Spinoza’s God is sharply at variance with all other divine conceptions.

The argument has only one substantive premise … which, though unproved, is not unreasonable; it is, in fact, the claim that the universe itself is thoroughly reasonable.  Though this first premise can’t be proved, it is the guiding faith of many physicists (including Einstein).  It is the claim that everything must have an explanation; even the laws of nature, in terms of which processes are explained, must have an explanation. In other words, there has to be an explanation for why it is these laws of nature rather than some other, which is another way of asking for why it is this world rather than some other.

She points out that:

Spinoza’s argument, if sound, invalidates all the other arguments, the ones that try to establish the existence of a more traditional God—that is, a God who stands distinct from the world described by the laws of nature, as well as distinct from the world of human meaning, purpose, and morality. Spinoza’s argument claims that any transcendent God, standing outside of that for which he is invoked as explanation, is invalidated by the first powerful premise [‘all facts must have explanations’] that all things are part of the same explanatory fabric. The mere coherence of The Argument from The Intelligibility of The Universe, therefore, is sufficient to reveal the invalidity of the other theistic arguments. This is why Spinoza, although he offered a proof of what he called “God,” is often regarded as the most effective of all atheists.

There’s a feast for discussion here; not just dishes but whole courses. Bon appétit!

Jillian Becker    November 24, 2009

To improve their scores and life-chances, black kids doing badly at school in Minnesota are to be taught even worse rubbish than public schools already teach, as the bright sparks who decide such things plan to instill in them a sturdy sense of victimhood, self-pity, envy and resentment. That should be a real leg-up for them, saving them from any misguided ambition to do well and get ahead.

White middle-class teachers will only be licensed to carry out this noble work if they abase themselves, eat crow, and repent in writing for not being black, and/or poor, and/or homosexual, or (where applicable) at the very least female.

This is from the Star Tribune by Katherine Kersten:

Do you believe in the American dream — the idea that in this country, hardworking people of every race, color and creed can get ahead on their own merits? If so, that belief may soon bar you from getting a license to teach in Minnesota public schools — at least if you plan to get your teaching degree at the University of Minnesota’s Twin Cities campus.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U’s College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of “the American Dream” in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace — and be prepared to teach our state’s kids — the task force’s own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

The task group is part of the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, a multiyear project to change the way future teachers are trained at the U’s flagship campus. The initiative is premised, in part, on the conviction that Minnesota teachers’ lack of “cultural competence” contributes to the poor academic performance of the state’s minority students. Last spring, it charged the task group with coming up with recommendations to change this. In January, planners will review the recommendations and decide how to proceed.

The report advocates making race, class and gender politics the “overarching framework” for all teaching courses at the U. It calls for evaluating future teachers in both coursework and practice teaching based on their willingness to fall into ideological lockstep.

The first step toward “cultural competence,” says the task group, is for future teachers to recognize — and confess — their own bigotry. Anyone familiar with the reeducation camps of China’s Cultural Revolution will recognize the modus operandi.

The task group recommends, for example, that prospective teachers be required to prepare an “autoethnography” report. They must describe their own prejudices and stereotypes, question their “cultural” motives for wishing to become teachers, and take a “cultural intelligence” assessment designed to ferret out their latent racism, classism and other “isms.” They “earn points” for “demonstrating the ability to be self-critical.”

The task group opens its report with a model for officially approved confessional statements: “As an Anglo teacher, I struggle to quiet voices from my own farm family, echoing as always from some unstated standard. … How can we untangle our own deeply entrenched assumptions?”

The goal of these exercises, in the task group’s words, is to ensure that “future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression.”

Future teachers must also recognize and denounce the fundamental injustices at the heart of American society, says the task group. From a historical perspective, they must “understand that … many groups are typically not included” within America’s “celebrated cultural identity,” and that “such exclusion is frequently a result of dissimilarities in power and influence.” In particular, aspiring teachers must be able “to explain how institutional racism works in schools.” …

That part should be easy. They have only to talk about the anti-white, anti-Anglo indoctrination in their own training.

This joke, funny yet too near the bone to be very funny, is going the rounds in England. We have not found the source. If we do, we’ll acknowledge it.

1. Teaching Maths In 1970

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.

What is his profit?

2. Teaching Maths In 1980

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is 80% of the price.

What is his profit?

3. Teaching Maths In 1990

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is £80.

How much was his profit?

4. Teaching Maths In 2000

A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.

His cost of production is £80 and his profit is £20.

Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Maths In 2005

A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing for the habitat of animals or the preservation of our woodlands.

Your assignment: Discuss how the birds and squirrels might feel as the logger cut down their homes for just a measly profit of £20.

6. Teaching Maths In 2009

A logger is arrested for trying to cut down a tree in case it may be offensive to Muslims or other religious groups not consulted in the Felling License.

He is also fined £100 for his chainsaw in breach of Health and Safety legislation as it is deemed too dangerous and could cut something.

He has used the chainsaw for over 20 years without incident however he does not have the correct Certificate of Competence and is therefore considered to be a recidivist and habitual criminal. His DNA is sampled and his details circulated throughout all government agencies.

He protests and is taken to Court and fined another £100 because he is such  an easy target.

When he is released he returns to find Gypsies have cut down half his wood to build a camp on his land.

He tries to throw them off but is arrested, prosecuted for harassing an ethnic minority, imprisoned and fined a further £100.

While he is in jail the Gypsies cut down the rest of his wood and sell it on the black market for £100 cash. They also have a leaving BBQ of squirrel and pheasant and depart leaving behind several tonnes of rubbish and asbestos sheeting. The forester on release is warned that failure to clear the fly tipped rubbish immediately at his own cost is an offence.

He complains and is arrested for environmental pollution and breach of the peace, and invoiced £12,000 plus VAT for safe disposal costs by a regulated Government contractor.

Your assignment: How many times is the forester going to have to be arrested and fined before he realises that he is never going to make £20 profit by hard work, give up, sign on to the dole and live off the state for the rest of his life?

7. Teaching Maths In 2010

A logger doesn’t sell a lorry load of timber because he can’t get a loan to buy a new lorry because his bank has spent all his and their money on a derivative of securitised debt related to sub- prime mortgages in Alabama and lost the lot with only some government money left to pay a few million pound bonuses to their senior directors and the traders who made the biggest losses.

The logger struggles to pay the £1,200 road tax on his old lorry, however, as it was built in the 1970s it no longer meets the Emissions Regulations and he is forced to scrap it.

Some Bulgarian loggers buy the lorry from the scrap merchant and put it back on the road. They undercut everyone on price for haulage and send their cash back home, while claiming unemployment for themselves and their relatives. If questioned they speak no English and it is easier to deport them at the Governments expense.

Following their holiday back home they return to the UK with different names and fresh girls and start again. The logger protests, is accused of being a bigoted racist and as his name is on the side of his old lorry he is forced to pay £1,500 registration fees as a gang master.

The Government borrows more money to pay more to the bankers as bonuses are not cheap. The parliamentarians feel they are missing out and claim the difference on expenses and allowances.

You do the maths.

8. Teaching Maths 2017

أ المسجل تبيع حموله شاحنة من الخشب من اجل 100 دولار. صاحب ت3لفة

الانتاج من

الثمن. ما هو الربح له؟

On December 7 the United Nations Conference on Climate Change is due to open in Copenhagen, although it is already rendered nugatory by the refusal of China and India, and the inability of the United States, to take those measures which would allow it to achieve its goal: world-wide redistribution of wealth by a global authority, an incipient world government.

Now that the United Nations IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report which launched the campaign towards this end has been exposed as a deliberate fraud, the conference can be nothing but a farce. It should be abandoned.

(Our posts on the fraud are Global warming scientists disgrace their profession and Making up science for political ends.)

A useful summary of the ‘smoking-gun’ emails is provided here. (This is a religious site that we don’t habitually visit, but in regard to this subject we are grateful for their useful work.)

Alan Caruba writes at Canada Free Press:

Now that CRU [Climatic Research Unit] and its conspirators have been exposed, there truly is no need to hold a December UN climate change conference in Copenhagen; one in which nations would be required to put limits on “greenhouse gas emissions” even though such gases, primarily carbon dioxide, have nothing to do with altering the Earth’s climate.

And that is why you are going to hear more about “climate change” and far less about “global warming.” Hidden in such discussions, intended to justify legislation and regulation, is that the Earth’s climate has always and will always change.

It is, for example, shameful and deceitful for the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to claim carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. The same applies to “cap-and-trade” legislation with the same purpose.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies such as NASA that have lent credence to the global warming hoax.

“The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing,” says Christopher C. Horner, a longtime global warming skeptic. “There are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.”

Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”

The climate, defined as long term trends, and the weather has nothing whatever to do with human activity and suggesting it does reveals the depth of contempt that people like Al Gore and his ilk have for humanity and those fleeced by purchasing “carbon credits” or paying more for electricity when their utility does.

The East Anglia CRU charlatans have been exposed. Most certainly, the United Nations IPCC should be disbanded in disgrace. It belongs in a museum of hoaxes right beside the Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness Monster.

From Instapundit:

I think Obama’s “charisma” was based on voter narcissism — people excited not just about electing a black President, but about themselves, voting for a black President. Now that’s over, and they’re stuck just with him, and emptied of their own narcissism there’s not much there to fill out the suit.

We have had the same thought. We call it moral vanity. And racism.

The scandal over the global warming fraud (see our post Making up science for political ends) spreads and grows, as it should. With luck it may kill off the left’s myth of anthropogenic global warming once and for all.

From Erick Erickson at RedState:

Late last week, servers at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit … were hacked and over 172 megabytes of data dumped onto the internet for public access.

The data paints an ugly picture of scientists operating as political hacks orchestrating smear campaigns against global warming dissidents, deleting files rather than make their data publicly available, and manufacturing data to prove their case when the actual data does nothing of the sort. …

The Australian Herald Sun was one of the first to cover the story. They note:

The 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory – a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below – emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down skeptics. …

The highlights [from sources digging into the emails] are:

• Prominent environmental scientists organize a boycott of scientific journals if those journals publish scholarly material from global warming dissidents.
• The scientists then orchestrate attacks on the dissidents because of their lack of scholarly material published in scientific journals.
• The scientists block from the UN’s report on global warming evidence that is harmful to the anthropogenic global warming consensus.
• The scientists, when faced with a freedom of information act request for their correspondence and data, delete the correspondence and data lest it be used against them.
• The scientists fabricate data when their data fails to prove the earth is warming. In fact, in more than one case, scientists engaged in lengthy emails on how to insert additional made up data that would in turn cause their claims to stand out as legitimate.

From our reader, Moe:

The New GM (Government Motors)

Proudly Introduces

The 2010 Obama

This car runs on hot air, bull-shit, and broken promises.

It has three wheels that speed the vehicle through tight left turns.

It comes complete with two Teleprompters, programmed to help the occupants talk their way out of any violations.

The transparent canopy reveals the plastic smiles still on the faces of all the happy owners.

Comes in S, M, L, XL and 2XL

It won’t get you to work, but hey, there aren’t any jobs anyway!!!

Senator Chris Dodd, one of the gang still at large that caused the housing bubble and the consequent collapse of the global economy, is also answerable for the Livable Communities Act, which prescribes:

• Where you must live. – In a tightly packed urban ‘community’.

• How you must live. – For instance, how warm your house and water can be. Big Daddy can easily control this by a device fitted to your thermostat that will hold it to an approved degree. You will be monitored for cheating. Your heating in winter and cooling in summer may be switched off completely ‘to save energy’ without your being consulted or even notified. California is a pioneer in this particular leap forward.

• Where you may work. – Near enough for you to get there by walking, biking, or taking a ride on a bus if you must.

• How you may get about. – By foot, bicycle, wheelchair, scooter, skates, or bus if you must. But not by your own car. To do that is to waste fuel and spoil the atmosphere, and so to darken your soul with the worst of sins in the new religion of environmentalism: harming the environment. This will soon be not only a sin but a crime.

You can read the Livable Communities Act, number S.1619, at Thomas.loc.gov.

And you can enjoy a discussion of it by witty people who share your disgust at PajamasTV here.

Detroit is a dying city. How many more American cities will fall into decay and despair as Obama and the Democrats bankrupt the nation?

From the Times Online:

The abandoned corpses, in white body bags with number tags tied to each toe, lie one above the other on steel racks inside a giant freezer in Detroit’s central mortuary, like discarded shoes in the back of a wardrobe.

Some have lain here for years, but in recent months the number of unclaimed bodies has reached a record high. For in this city that once symbolised the American Dream many cannot even afford to bury their dead.

“I have not seen this many unclaimed bodies in 13 years on the job,” said Albert Samuels, chief investigator at the mortuary. “It started happening when the economy went south last year. I have never seen this many people struggling to give people their last resting place.”

Unburied bodies piling up in the city mortuary — it reached 70 earlier this year — is the latest and perhaps most appalling indignity to be heaped on the people of Detroit. The motor city that once boasted the highest median income and home ownership rate in the US is today in the midst of a long and agonising death spiral.

After years of gross mismanagement by the city’s leaders and the big three car manufacturers of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, who continued to make vehicles that Americans no longer wanted to buy, Detroit today has an unemployment rate of 28 per cent, higher even than the worst years of the Great Depression.

The murder rate is soaring. The school system is in receivership. The city treasury is $300 million (£182m) short of the funds needed to provide the most basic services such as rubbish collection. In its postwar heyday, when Detroit helped the US to dominate the world’s car market, it had 1.85 million people. Today, just over 900,000 remain. It was once America’s fourth-largest city. Today, it ranks eleventh, and will continue to fall.

Thousands of houses are abandoned, roofs ripped off, windows smashed. Block after block of shopping districts lie boarded up. Former manufacturing plants, such as the giant Fisher body plant that made Buicks and Cadillacs, but which was abandoned in 1991, are rotting. …

Read more of this depressing stuff, if you want to, here.

Life in Britain is increasingly nasty. One of the many conditions making it so are laws conforming to political correctness and EU nonsense about ‘human rights’ – two considerations that guarantee injustice. It was most likely political correctness more than any other consideration that was responsible for the framing of the tyrannical gun laws.

A case in point:

Paul Clarke, an ex-soldier, was standing on the balcony of his home when he spotted a black bin-liner lying at the end of his garden. He went to  see what was in it and found a sawn-off shotgun and two shells. He phoned the Reigate police and  told them what he’d found, then took it to the police station. On his arrival he was arrested, charged with possession of a firearm, and locked up.

At his trial he was found guilty of having a firearm in his possession and will be sentenced  on December 11. The penalty is five years in prison, minimum.

Telling and commenting on the story in Canada Free Press, Jerry A. Kane writes:

In court, Clarke’s defense attorney pointed to a police leaflet that urged citizens to report found firearms. The attorney argued that the leaflet contained no information warning citizens not to touch the firearm, report it by telephone, or take it into a police station.

The prosecutor argued that possession of a firearm is a “strict liability” charge and one’s intent is irrelevant. The prosecutor maintained that Clarke is guilty of having the gun in his possession and therefore has no defense in law against the charge.

Although the judge admitted the case was unusual, he added that “in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.” …

Only in totalitarian societies can handing in a discarded firearm to the police be construed as criminal behavior punishable by imprisonment.

Quoting from George Orwell’s 1984 Kane concludes:

To picture what lies ahead for the UK, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”