Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Aurelius Debates Kirk Cameron
The Way of the Master. No, this is not a link to some S & M website, this is the spooky website that C-Dawgz been posting in my comments section. The 'Master', I assume, is His Lord Jesus Christ, and his lackey appears to be Kirk Cameron. The gist of this particular episode deals with 'how to put any atheist on the defensive.'
In the words of Samual L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, "Allow me to retort."
Mr. Cameron begins his rhetoric by listing off all of the possible loved ones in your life that might not be 'saved.' This is a typical opening for this sort of work, the setting of the stage with some common ground. Without going into too much detail, here the effort is just to reinforce the view that being 'saved' is a good thing. Kirk Cameron knows it is a good thing and so do you.
From here his partner and him do a bit of a back and forth, revealing that they will disprove atheism with a twist on the old Creator/Creation argument. This amused me right away. In this feat of logical prestidigitation, the attempt is not prove theism to a skeptic, it is to disprove atheism to a believer. This leads right into attack on the thinking ability of an atheist.
'I don't need faith to believe in a creator. I just need eyes to see and a mind that works.'
'Indeed, Kirk, it takes more faith to not believe in God, than it does to believe in Him.'
I see this done all the time in the pamphlets that attack evolution. Actually, it is done all the time in public relations campaigns, advertising, you name it. The tactic is to take your weakest point, and turn in around and attack your opponent on it. That their belief in a diety requires faith - well that's just obvious. As soon as one see a tactic like this used, red flags should be going up. This is an attempt to assert that there is really no difference between atheism and evagism - each requires faith in something they cannot see or prove. In fact, this asserts that atheism actually takes more faith than the positions that he believes, positions that he has conveniently not mentioned. Suffice to say, atheism as I understand it does not require any leaps of faith.
Now on to Mr. Cameron's main exposition of the inverted 'God in the works' proof.
Evag rhetoric enjoys repetition and phrases that resonate with biblical verse. Thus, the line 'all I need to understand their is a creator is eyes that can see, and a mind that works.' (roughly paraphrased) This statement got repeated at least a half dozen times in the first ten minutes. Eyes that see, invokes the biblical line, 'They have eyes, yet they do not see. . .' Unfortunately, often a line that sounds biblical will find fertile soil in a believer's mind.
Mr. Cameron is suddenly in front of an shiny, new, black SUV. He points to the various parts of the machine, and explains how each of them serves a purpose, has a place in a design. It would be silly, he contends, to see a machine like this a believe that it did not have a creator. Each part of the design obviously has a purpose, and if something has an obvious design it must have had a designer. Images of complex and beautiful lifeforms follow, and this arguement gets extended to the immensity of creation. From a lovely, symmetrical flower, to a close up of a dragonfly's eye, the narrator continues, 'since I have eyes that see and a mind that works, I can see the inherit design in the world and understand that there must be a designer.'
Now first off. I don't buy that comparison. I may see a Ford Expedition and assume that it has a designer, but that deduction is not based only on the cleverness of the design. Having been on this planet for a while, I've seen that human beings have produced automobiles. I've watched programs on cable that show the insides of assembly lines; I understand that the creation of such a device is within the capabilities of modern man. Now if I lived in a stone-age society, if the greatest display of human ingenuity was a sharp piece of flint, then something like a Ford Expedition might challenge my assumptions that such a vehical had a human designer.
Indeed, human history is filled with examples of things that people could not comprehend being granted divine or supernatural origins. When the conquistidors began jacking the aztecs; the latter, having never seen iron, horses, or facial hair, believed that these mounted warriors were some sort of centaur-like beast. Is that not the short answer for why religions began in the first place, to answer questions that our human understanding could not yet decypher?
I have seen human's produce things similar to trucks and pocketwatches, so the logical step that the next truck or pocketwatch I see had a designer/creator does not require a leap of faith. I have never seen the production of a life supporting planet nor of a human being from dust, thus to assume such objects also had a designer/creator - this is saying that everything in the universe had a purposeful design and actual designer. That is a leap of faith.
Theist's will often point to Mt. Rushmore and argue that if you saw out of the blue, you would not assume that it had just happened naturally from erosion. Obviously, the design (the faces look like faces on your money) implies that it had a designer.
Again, to state that one example of human design, implies a universe filled 100% with objects of supernatural design is not good logic.
Here in Minnesota, we have a state park along the Mississippi. When climbing along the rocky, pine tree studded landscape, one come accross many of these near perfect cylinder straight down into the rock. About four to six inches accross, often three or more feet deep, these weird shafts will often contain a sphere of the same rock at the bottom. When Cindy and I were hiking out there last year I could not comprehend how these suckers were formed. They literally look like someone took a diamond tipped auger and went to town, and they are all over the place. I honestly thought that some human force must have made them for some purpose I couldn't think of. They seemed too mathamatically perfect to have natural causes. Yet when we got to the parks interpetive center, and watched a film on the effects of retreating glaciation, the natural forces at work seem plausible.
Mr. Cameron and those who advance this argument often do this. They draw such sweeping rhetorical strokes, from the interaction of a bee hive to the big bang, from the beauty of a flower to the intricisies of the eye that beholds it - each element can be plausibly explained, but that explanation might take a while. Instead of listening to this explanation, they instead throw out another dozen examples of complexity.
A great tale I heard in Catholic school involved a man who did not want to believe in God, he wanted to understand him. This wish drove him into depression, until one night God answered his prayers in a dream. He was a boy standing beside the ocean with a little red bucket. His white bearded companion instructed him to place all of the ocean into his one little bucket. 'But I can't', he replied, 'it just won't fit.' 'Ah,' replied his now Revealed Speaker, 'thus the enormity of the Kingdom of God will not fit into a single human brain.' Great story, and useful here.
No single human being is ever going to be able to learn enough about astronomy, biology, genetics, antropology, sociology, religion, chemistry, physics, and on to be able to explain every single one of Mr. Cameron's examples. It would be much easier to just believe that they were designed and created. What is easier is not always what is right.
I'll continue this later, in particular with some continued thoughts on the human eyeball as a natural developement and the notion that Charles Darwin was not a prophet - nobody's claiming the inerracy of 'Origins of Species.'
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I have a video clip on my blog of one of those goons explaining how a banana was proof of God's existence. It rather looks like he's doting upon a phallus, and the guy's co-host seems to notice, because he can't stop snickering.
Comedic gold.
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Comedic gold.
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