» Sunday, 22 April A.D. 2007

john c. wright

I've never heard of John C. Wright--apparently he's a sci-fi writer of some sort. Interesting enough, I suppose. But anybody who writes pieces like Thank God for Reasonable Atheists is OK in my book. Excerpts:

An atheist who doubts my friend's testimony is NOT doubting on the grounds of the evidence. The evidence here suggests a prayer was answered. That is what the eyewitness says. The atheist has a theory of the universe (or, rather, certain doubts about the commonly accepted theory of the universe) and on those grounds and on those grounds alone voices a doubt about the reliability of the witness. He finds the testimony incredible because and only because he does not credit it. The atheist never even bothers to find out whether the eyewitness is a truthful man in other things.

If you are going to say, well the so-called eyewitness did not see anything happen with his eye, I will say back, that you should go to a court of law more often, and find out about the rules of evidence. Mental events are real, and juries rule on them. Juries routinely must determine the mens rea, the state of mind of the accused, before a verdict can be reached. One cannot be convicted of first degree murder, for example, without the jury being convinced beyond reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty that the accused had malice aforethought--that a certain state of mind was in his mind.

Let us also look at the testimony of the early Apostles. On the one hand, we have a written testimony that purports to be an eyewitness account. According to that account, Peter, before the resurrection, after assuring his master he would never deny him, denies him three times before cockcrow. This same Peter, after the Pentecost, suffers a sufficient change in personality, that the prospect of a lingering and painful death at the hands of Roman authorities holds no terror for him. Same man. Why the change? He is given every opportunity to recant, and every pressure that can possibly be brought to bear is brought.

Paul is an even more extreme case: here we have a man who was high in the counsels of the Jews, an elder of the Church, and a citizen of Rome. He gave up his comfortable life and high position rather than recant and save his life.

You might ask what this proves? You might say many a fanatic is willing to die for his belief: it means nothing more than that religious belief is dangerous to the health! True enough. But this is not lawyerly reasoning. When examining the testimony of an eyewitness, you look to see if he is in debt or under some other constraint or compulsion that might get him to lie, or if he has a reputation for honesty in the community. The written admission of Peter's treason is a statement against interest. People do not normally go around admitting that they did shameful things. If we believe written account at all, we should be, by the rules of evidence, more willing to believe a statement against interest. Once we believe that, we are left unable to explain his later change of heart: what turned him from a coward to a man as unafraid of death as Socrates or Leonidas? Normal experience says a man cannot make himself uncowardly by a mere act of willpower.

You might say, well, the Bible is a collection of claptrap. How do we know any of these events actually happened? Here again, the doubt comes not because of the reliability of the evidence, for we believe the account of Plutarch or Josephus whose written works have no more or less surrounding evidence. The last stand of Masada we know only from Josephus: but who honestly doubts the event occurred? The doubt comes only because the atheist does not have a theory of the universe which admits of the possibility of the events described happened as described. He is incredulous only because he does not credit what the witness on the stand has said, not because there is any scintilla of evidence that the witness has a reputation for falsehood.

A long quote, but definitely worth quoting to get the full context. Or:

Christianity forms a coherent and logical account or story of life and all its sufferings. Every rival against it is a partial system, addressing some issues in life and not others. Communism, for example, has no real stance on marriage, even though marriage is more central to most people's lives than wage earning. Modern science, often held up as a contrast to Christianity, is in fact merely a handmaiden to Christianity: it answers empirical questions about efficient causes. Science can tell you how to experiment on human embryos or gas Jews, but not whether you should.

Or even:

The main line of attack of the reasonable skeptic is epistemology: he asks by what means it is assured that revelations or inspirations so called can be confirmed as veridical. The problem is that the prestige of the material sciences is so great, that every philosopher since Hume seems to conclude that no faculty of the reason exists save for what rests upon deductions from the senses. But this conclusion is itself not something that rests on any deduction from the senses: it is a metaphysical proposition. When we discuss the minimum wage law or the axiom that all men are created equal, we are discussing propositions that cannot be reduced to merely the measurement of empirical magnitudes: we are discussing wisdom, not logic, the ability to make judgment calls, not the ability to deduce one proposition from another.

(Emphasis my own in that last bit. People arguing the supremacy of reason always either haven't thought through their grounding for such--to realize that there isn't any--or conveniently ignore this crucial observation.)

I didn't see anything that I hadn't read before in the link above, but I sure enjoyed reading it again stated so eloquently and calmly. Definitely worth a read.

posted by Nate @ 2:42PM