I've been thinking about writing another nonfiction book in the same vein as Divine Evolution and Counterargument for God. The tentative title of this planned new work is God or Good Luck? The difference between this new book and those first two books is that I don't plan on quoting anybody else, only to cite their work and suggest to my readers that they should investigate on their own. No footnotes, or end notes, and no need for a bibliography. In my opinion, not only should you doubt everything I say and investigate it on your own, you should take that approach with anything you read, no matter who wrote it. This time I plan to begin my argument at the beginning and take it straight through to the end in the most coherent manner possible, so the point I'm trying to make is so crystal clear and no one could possibly claim to be confused, not even my harshest critic (who skipped over most of the book he critiqued). Even the title of this proposed new book is pretty self-explanatory...the best explanation of "everything" or anything can be easily boiled down to a dichotomy of only two real choices: it's either God or good luck. Any and every other potential answer can ultimately be shown to be an inferior (and inadequate) substitution for one or the other--whether that suggested alternative is claimed to be science, nature, multiverses, quantum physics, string theory, an invisible wizard who lives in the sky, or even a flying spaghetti monster. Every one of them is a form of good luck, or represents a god. Absent a creator God, the existence of our universe becomes … [Read more...]
Crushing an atheist’s spirit
[EDITOR'S NOTE: After one last scan of the article, it occurs to me the title needs some explanation. This isn't the actual goal of Mr. Doopy--he's trying to convince the other party in their debate that STL actually has a soul that can be crushed. No one was physically harmed in this battle of wits, if that's what this should be called.] Personally, I've begun to shy away from engaging with liberals or atheists in debate on the Internet because it's a tremendous time-suck, I'm not getting any younger, and my books unfortunately won't write themselves. It's just not a very productive use of my time, in my opinion, because the typical online debate adversary tends to assume several things that are inevitably untrue: these include the supposition opposing arguments cannot be supported by evidence, that arguments believed by consensus must be accepted as true, and that modern religious beliefs are only held by uneducated fools. Most often, this anonymous Internet opponent proves to be immune to all logic and reason, and devoid of any common sense. The effort usually strikes me as a colossal waste of valuable time so gradually, I've removed myself from groups where the trolls lurk, never seeming to have anything better to do than try to annoy me with ridiculous, ill-conceived arguments that usually degenerate into nothing more than childish insults or ad hominem. Nobody is ever going to admit, "You're right. I concede that my argument is inferior to yours."--no matter what transpires in the course of the debate, it has been my experience that the opponent never admits … [Read more...]
The reality of miracles
Landen Hoffman About a month or so ago, my life dramatically improved after I basically stopped arguing with people on social media. First I announced that I was leaving Facebook entirely, only to have my wife talk me out of it, by surprise. But I did hold true to my promise to remove myself from all the "debate" forums where I wasted WAY too much of my life in ultimately fruitless conversations with people uninterested in reason and evidence when it might have an adverse effect on their current thinking. In fact, one of the most ridiculous arguments that I have had to deal with during my time spent as a Christian pugilist (never been very apologetic about my own thoughts and opinions) on the internet has been the claim by a few of the more outspoken atheists that miracles do not ever occur because God does not exist. It is ridiculous to argue about miracles because (a.) the definition of one is nebulous and (b.) people who don't believe in miracles can easily reject them as failing to meet their nonexistent criteria for one. To an atheist, a miracle probably requires them to see a physical manifestation of divine intervention, and even then they might dismiss their witness of a miracle as a hallucination their mind imagined because most atheists don't want to believe in God. Why would I say that? It sounds kind of harsh and judgmental, I suppose, but I said it because it is true. Atheists have made up their mind, and just like everybody else, they don't want to be wrong. This explains why there are so many atheists wasting their lives on social media arguing with … [Read more...]
A slight change of plans
It's all good. Well, okay, it's only mostly good. There was that whole yellow jacket incident. The past 72 hours or so have been very interesting. Almost nothing has gone according to plan, but the best explanation for that is that I didn't really have a well-developed plan in the first place, just a convicted thought about needing to improve my productivity. For a guy who spends most of his time writing, I don't get nearly enough real work accomplished. I had the initial impulse to permanently delete my Facebook account primarily because of my own lack of discipline, as far as productive work is concerned. I announced this decision to the general public before discussing it with my wife, which rarely works out for the best because she's not as quick to jump to hasty conclusions. In case you haven't figured it out yet, she's the real brains in our family. Lisa's first concerns were the pictures of the grandkids our daughter posts on Facebook all the time. Didn't I still want to see them? She then asked, what about your high school English teacher and the friends you've made in Australia, and those connections you truly care about? She reminded me the problem with Facebook isn't the people as much as how I've been using the medium. I'll admit that I was more than a little surprised that her reaction wasn't anything but, "Thank God!" Changes had to be made, though, and changes have already occurred. Changes NEEDED to be made because I just can't spend the rest of my life arguing with idiots on Facebook. It doesn't produce income. Liberals and atheists tend to … [Read more...]
Vincible Ignorance
Physicist Sean Carroll An article at American Thinker about conspiracy theories and the moon landing caught my attention when the term vincible ignorance was introduced and defined as the "stubborn resistance to the truth and refusal to accept it, no matter how overwhelming the evidence in its favor is." Coined with the intention of being applied to various positions on Catholic dogma, the terminology has useful application in a more secular context. Invincible ignorance has been defined as an unknown that can never be known. A secular example of invincible ignorance might be the conditions that existed prior to the Big Bang singularity--we "know" the universe had an origin because we've been told evidence for the Big Bang exists, called redshift and cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). The consensus of physicists (although consensus is not science) is that a very small, highly condensed dot of material rapidly expanded to become this universe. We don't know what existed prior to the Big Bang. We can only guess and speculate. It would be an example of vincible ignorance to know about redshift and CMB evidence and still reject the Big Bang evidence in favor of the steady state (eternal, unchanging universe) hypothesis. While similar to the phrase I began using a while ago, the subtle difference between vincible ignorance and willful ignorance is knowing and rejecting the truth as opposed to simply avoiding it. The distinction appears to be useful, to be sure. For example several years ago, while participating on an internet panel to discuss his … [Read more...]
