withallyourmind.net

Greg Koukl, in the May/June 2008 issue of Solid Ground offers a crash course in critical thinking:

The primary purpose of reason is to help us discover what is true. The primary tool of reason is argument. An argument is a specific kind of thing. Think of it like a simple house, a roof supported by walls. The roof is the conclusion, and the walls are the supporting ideas. If the walls are solid, the conclusion rests securely on its supporting structure. If the walls collapse, the roof comes down, and the argument is defeated.

Looking at some of the arguments of the New Athiests, he shows how to develop a game plan for evaluating any argument. He does so by suggesting we ask 4 basic questions:

1. What is the claim being made?
2. What are the reasons given to support the claim?
3. Which appeals are irrelevant?
4. Does the conclusion follow from the evidence?

I recommend the entire article if you wish to learn to reason more carefully through any argument.

John Mark Reynolds has recently attempted to answer the question, “Should I play Grand Theft Auto?” As a lover of gaming, this is a question he must face. As one who enjoys playing some games, but rarely doing so, this question was not even on my radar screen.

The reason I link to Reynolds’ reflection on the subject is because he is an excellent thinker who provides a template useful for reflection on any such question. A person is often faced with decisions which are not inherently immoral, yet should not flippantly be approved or disapproved. Reading through his thoughts might be helpful and instructive to others as they face similar choices.

Being the economic and social conservative that I am, I will periodically head over to the National Review Online to peruse the offerings. I was disappointed to read John Derbyshire’s flawed review of the recent movie (which he hasn’t even seen) Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I was glad to see David Berlinski, who not only saw but appeared in the movie, respond at NRO today. Berlinski is the author of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions.

The most tragic dimension of all this is that a culture increasingly ready to euthanize the old, infanticize the young, and adamant about a “right” to abort unborn human beings, will now contend for the inherent dignity of plants. Can any culture recover from this?

So concludes Al Mohler his blog post “Plant Rights, Screaming Vegetation, and a ‘Biocentric’ Worldview.” As he points out, it is one thing to honor God by taking good care of his creation, it is another to claim, as some are, a “right to life” for vegetation. Ethicist Wesley Smith states:

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

I received an email a few weeks ago from Marc who asked if I would be willing to answer two main points which ID critics cite when attempting to label ID as unscientific. Today, I’ll take a look at one of the two, that is, “Isn’t ID internally inconsistent because it invokes the existence of something even more complex to explain the complexity of life on earth?” This is an objection that Dawkins refers to in his book The God Delusion. No explanatory advance is made in such a case as now one would be left with an even more complex entity needing explanation.

William Lane Craig addresses this issue in his evaluation of the Dawkins’ central argument of his book which can be found here. Here are a couple of take home points in answering this objection.

First of all, this objection cannot be fully answered without considering how one is to weigh competing explanations for a phenomenon. This is not a simple question and has been the subject of much philosophical reflection. It is implied in this objection that simplicity is the most important criteria. However, there are other important criteria which must be weighed, such as, explanatory power, explanatory scope, and so on.

Second, if one grants that simplicity is the most important criteria in this case, the objection contains a fatal flaw in its assumption that a divine designer (I must interject that ID as a scientific endeavor does not identify the designer as a divine being, but many understand the designer to be divine, and the objection implies the designer is divine.) is an equally complex or more complex entity than the universe. Craig states:

As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable quantities and constants, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—, but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity.

So, this objection confuses a mind’s ideas, which may be complex, with a mind itself, which is a simple entity. Therefore, the objection fails since an advance in simplicity is acheived by positing a divine mind.