• Keeps entries in text files. I fear databases.
  
• Seems to have a better security record than Wordpress.
  
• In Python, so hackable and I'd feel I'd have some hope of understanding what it's doing (Wordpress is in PHP).

• Very active developer community, so lots of nice plugins. (PyBlosxom isn't abandoned but doesn't have so many people working on it).
  
• More themes, some of which are pretty (PyBlosxom has a few themes in their repository, none of which are that pretty).

• The Kalam Cosmological argument, a First Cause argument which avoids the usual "who made God?" riposte by only claiming that "everything that begins to exist has a cause".
• The moral argument.
• An argument based on the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus.

William Lane Craig's opening

Reason 1: The Kalam argument

Reason 2: The moral argument

Reason 3: The resurrection of Jesus

Stephen Law's opening

Craig's 1st rebuttal

Law's 1st rebuttal

Craig's 2nd rebuttal

Law's 2nd rebuttal

Craig's summing up

Law's summing up

How did they do?

In which I play the armchair general with 20-20 hindsight

How do you solve a problem like the Kalam?

Arguments from authority

The resurrection

The moral argument

The segue

Other reactions

Craig argues that science itself is permeated with assumptions about the world that cannot be scientifically justified, but are based on faith. One of these is the validity of inductive reasoning: "Just because A has always been followed by B every time in the past is no proof at all that A will be followed by B tomorrow." To suppose the latter requires faith.

cartesiandaemon

The problem here, which makes the atheist's argument a bad one, is that the atheist has cast their net too broadly. Craig is right to say that there are things that atheists (and everyone else) believe "on faith". To say that these beliefs are always unwarranted leaves the atheist open to Craig's counter-argument that, to be consistent, the atheist should then discard those beliefs or admit that it's not always wrong to believe things without evidence.

Doing better

Nevertheless, something has gone wrong with Craig's argument if it's supposed to be a defence of religious faith (as all Craig's arguments ultimately are). Religious faith is different from belief in induction or the existence of an external world. The atheist should abandon the claim that unevidenced beliefs are always bad, and concentrate on the distinction between religious beliefs and, say, the belief that the external world is real.

One way of doing that would be to turn Craig's allegation of inconsistency back on him. As Chris Hallquist puts it

belief in the Christian God isn't very much at all like most of the common-sense beliefs commonly cited as threatened by Descartes & Hume-style skepticism (like belief in the reliability of our senses), but is an awful lot like beliefs most Christians wouldn't accept without evidence - namely, the beliefs of other religions.

Hume's own solution to radical scepticism was to note that he couldn't entertain that sort of thing for long. Creatures like us soon fall unavoidably back on treating other people as if they were conscious, the world as if it were real, and so on. The great man tells us:

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.

Edit: gjm11 suggests another reasonable response in this comment: admit that believing stuff without evidence is bad, and try to minimise it, and say that the problem with religious faith (in so far as that means holding unevidenced beliefs) is that it means having way more unevidenced beliefs than necessary.

Edit again: I've also commented with a shorter version of this on Coyne's original posting, so there's some discussion there too.

See also

• Everything is a faith position, atheism is a religion, my previous Bad Argument posting.
• Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, Eliezer Yudkowsky's take on radical scepticism and suchlike.

I've seen many attempts to get around the problem with morality - that it cannot possibly be everything that it is widely thought to be (action guiding, intrinsically prescriptive, objectively correct, etc.). In my experience, this is like trying to get rid of the bump in the carpet. The bump always pops up somewhere else. We have to live with it.

In the case of free standing feelings that we ought to do something regardless of other benefits to us (assuming that such feelings exist and aren't always just concealed desires for our own benefit, for example, the pleasure we get by doing good), it seems that our upbringing or genes have gifted us with these goals (even in the case of the pleasure, something has arranged it so that doing good feels pleasurable to us).

Assuming that we could work out any particular person's process for deciding whether something is right, we could possibly present it to them and say "there you go, that's morality, at least as far as you're concerned". There's the amusing possibility that they'd disagree, I suppose, since I think a lot of the process isn't consciously available to us. I think the carpet bump occurs at least in part because the typical human process is a lot more complex than any of the grand philosophical theories make it out to be.

We might also encounter people who disagree with us but are persuadable based on intuitions common to most humans, humans who aren't persuadable, human sociopaths, or (theoretically) paperclip maximizers. In the cases where someone else's morality is so alien that we cannot persuade them that it'd be bad to kill people for fun or turn the Earth and all that it contains a collection of paperclips, we can still think they ought not to do that, but it doesn't really do us much good unless we can enforce it somehow. I see no reason to suppose there's a universal solvent, a way of persuading any rational mind that it ought to do something independent of threats of enforcement.

And that's about it: when I say you ought or ought not to do something, I'm appealing to intuitions I hope we have in common, or possibly making a veiled threat or promise of reward. This works because it turns out that many humans do have a lot in common, especially if we were raised in similar cultures. But there's no reason to suppose there's more to it than that, moral laws floating around in a Platonic space or being grounded by God, or similar.

I don't find that this gives me much trouble in using moral language like "right" and "wrong", though to the extent that other people use those terms while thinking that there are rights and wrongs floating around in Platonic space which would compel any reasoning mind, I'm kind of an error theorist, I suppose, but I don't suppose that everyone does do that.

I've seen many attempts to get around the problem with morality - that it cannot possibly be everything that it is widely thought to be (action guiding, intrinsically prescriptive, objectively correct, etc.). In my experience, this is like trying to get rid of the bump in the carpet. The bump always pops up somewhere else. We have to live with it.

In the case of free standing feelings that we ought to do something regardless of other benefits to us (assuming that such feelings exist and aren't always just concealed desires for our own benefit, for example, the pleasure we get by doing good), it seems that our upbringing or genes have gifted us with these goals (even in the case of the pleasure, something has arranged it so that doing good feels pleasurable to us).

Assuming that we could work out any particular person's process for deciding whether something is right, we could possibly present it to them and say "there you go, that's morality, at least as far as you're concerned". There's the amusing possibility that they'd disagree, I suppose, since I think a lot of the process isn't consciously available to us. I think the carpet bump occurs at least in part because the typical human process is a lot more complex than any of the grand philosophical theories make it out to be.

We might also encounter people who disagree with us but are persuadable based on intuitions common to most humans, humans who aren't persuadable, human sociopaths, or (theoretically) paperclip maximizers. In the cases where someone else's morality is so alien that we cannot persuade them that it'd be bad to kill people for fun or turn the Earth and all that it contains a collection of paperclips, we can still think they ought not to do that, but it doesn't really do us much good unless we can enforce it somehow. I see no reason to suppose there's a universal solvent, a way of persuading any rational mind that it ought to do something independent of threats of enforcement.

And that's about it: when I say you ought or ought not to do something, I'm appealing to intuitions I hope we have in common, or possibly making a veiled threat or promise of reward. This works because it turns out that many humans do have a lot in common, especially if we were raised in similar cultures. But there's no reason to suppose there's more to it than that, moral laws floating around in a Platonic space or being grounded by God, or similar.

I don't find that this gives me much trouble in using moral language like "right" and "wrong", though to the extent that other people use those terms while thinking that there are rights and wrongs floating around in Platonic space which would compel any reasoning mind, I'm kind of an error theorist, I suppose, but I don't suppose that everyone does do that.

In his skeleton argument and in his oral submissions, Mr Diamond lays much emphasis upon various arguments, many of them couched in extravagant rhetoric, which, to speak plainly, are for the greater part, in our judgment, simply wrong as to the factual premises on which they are based and at best tendentious in their analysis of the issues.

tifferrobinson