Koukl responds to Feser and I respond to Koukl

You seem to jump straight to #4, which is obviously your prerogative, but you will most likely understand that everything you have to say about #4 is uninteresting to people who are not already convinced of #1-3.

I think that one has to sometimes erect theories before seeing the evidence which supports them. The history of atomic physics is instructive here, especially surrounding Ernst Mach. But physics is still too simplistic; one would have to look at the rise of sociology, psychology, and related fields that deal with more of the complexity and ickiness of real human existence. If someone needs to be led by the evidence every single step of the way, I’m probably not the right interlocutor. I’m not even sure many sociologists or psychologists get trained in a properly evidentialist way; they certainly weren’t while positivism was reigning!

That leaves the question wide open whether you have any argument left that establishes the existence of God as you conceive him – because if you don´t, then again, all the talk about what God does or does not want is moot to everyone who doesn´t already agree with you anyway.

The very problem, in my view, is relying too much on ‘argument’. This presupposes that God doesn’t want to act in any discernible way, and I just cannot convince myself this is true. Instead, I think this is too often true:

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. (2 Timothy 3:1–5)

(N.B. I don’t care about authorship issues right now.) What I see is a whole lot of items in that list, as well as a whole lot of items in Rom 1:18–2:24 that’s not ‘sexual immorality’. To add a few more, one can look at the positive vs. negative observable behaviors documented in Ja 3:13–18 and Gal 5:16–26. What I see is a lot of appearance of godliness which has no power, which even denies its power. As far as I can tell, the reason is that so many Christians are not willing to do the most basic of things, which I illustrate with my favorite four triads:

     • Mt 5:43–48, Jn 13:34–35, Jn 17:20–23
     • Mt 5:23–24, Mt 18:15–20, Eph 4:25–27
     • Mt 7:1–5, Mt 23:1–4, Gal 6:1–5
     • Mt 7:15–23, Mt 13:24–30, Mt 25:31–46

I think the power of God, the action of God, would be more visible if Christians were to do the most basic of things. And yes, I’m sure my listing above as “basic” will be contentious. I’m also aware of ways the above can be perverted, e.g. by preventing the challenge of sexual abuse via the “two or more witnesses” provision of Mt 18:16. Putting these things aside, I think God is waiting for us to grow up and actually need him to act. And I suspect that in realms of the world where people don’t have their heads as much up their butts as the West, God is acting—but in ways the West happily denies. After all, Westerners’ models of God has him acting differently, and surely these models have to be close to the truth! (screw Ps 50:19–21, Is 55:6-9, Is 58)

Which would be evidence for… unity amidst diversity. In other words, people putting Jesus’ moral teachings into practice does precisely nothing to support the claim that Jesus is divine and rose from the dead. In the same sense that people putting the Buddha´s teachings into practice would per se provide zero evidence for the existence of a cycle of death and rebirth and the Buddha escaping it through reaching the state of Nirvana.

I know we’ve talked about ‘unity amidst diversity’; sadly I don’t particularly recall those conversations and did not save any links to them as I have since started doing. However, I don’t think you’re necessarily correct. Unity amidst diversity might have the dynamic of the blind men and an elephant, except there is overlap between the various blind men’s sensory perceptions, such that they can ‘stitch together’ an elephant. This constitutes a convergence that is characteristic of truth, with a critical divergence from a major Enlightenment model of ‘Reason’: instead of every person having pretty much the same perceptions so that everyone can see things pretty much the same if they work hard enough to rid themselves of emotions cognitive biases, I’m positing a scenario where each person may have a unique perspective of God, which can be grown out (“seed of religion”) and ‘stitched together’ with other perspectives.

Were this scenario to obtain, one would not simply be working off of a static set of “moral teachings”. When I mention triads such as the four above, those are merely a starting place, part of the ‘unity’ of ‘unity amidst diversity’. If the diversity is continually growing, but not in a way that fractures unity, then one does need to posit a cause for the process. I think it would stretch the imagination to suppose that such growth is entirely naturalistic. At best it would be like the pre-established harmony of Leibniz’s Monadology, except pre-established harmony would make no sense, naturalistically.

But you jump straight to Bible exegesis without supporting any of the steps prior to it by evidence.

Do you think psychology or sociology is taught any differently? I’m fully aware that there are multiple interpretive frameworks (or: Kuhnian paradigms), and that the framework I present with my biblical exegesis is just one of them. This doesn’t particularly bother me, because I know there are multiple interpretive frameworks in the philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of QM, psychology, etc.

Perhaps the problem is that I identify myself as being in a position analogous to an ‘early believer’ in a new scientific paradigm. People in such positions rarely have a systematized, demonstrably better way of understanding reality. As Kuhn argued, people have to fight to change paradigms. In the beginning, the superiority of a new paradigm is highly intuitive, and only to a select few people. Indeed, in the beginning, the new paradigm will underperform in many ways, compared to the reigning paradigm with all its auxiliary hypotheses.

When people are in such a position of ‘early believer’, they cannot productively talk to very many people about their full, alternative paradigm. Indeed, they will be seen as loonies by most people. This dynamic makes it very difficult, because perhaps that is because one is a loony. The result is an obnoxious, precarious existence. I do the best I can, but I’m sure there are many ways I could improve.

Of course God could act in discernible ways, and if he did, no one would need to work on arguments to demonstrate for others that he exists.

How is this possibly true? For a long time, people saw the earth as encased in a solid canopy, a firmament. This is just how they interpreted reality, and to try and convince them of heliocentrism would probably have you dismissed as the lunatic. They might even say that if heliocentrism were true, nobody would need arguments, they would just ‘show’. Now, Galileo was finally able to do this when he got his telescope working and observed the phases of Venus. Before that, he couldn’t.

What is the case is that many people interpret plenty of events in reality today as involving divine action. To them, no argument is needed; it’s just obvious. But you reject this. You think it’s entirely non-obvious; you think there is no signal at all on divine action wavelengths. What I don’t understand is how you don’t see how taken-for-granted your interpretative stance is.

Well, it cannot be less visible…

Again, many people disagree with this. Why are you right, and they wrong? Don’t you dare say ‘science’, because by its very constitution, it cannot detect divine action. All quantities must be conserved; if they are not, an error in experimental setup is expected and found. All that science could ever discover is something that looks like a ‘law of nature’, which is precisely not what a ‘person’ is. Persons do more than just act uniformly and regularly. They have goals and act ‘rationally’, where the very meaning of ‘rationally’ changes over time (for example, becoming more complex and intricate). Indeed, Gregory W. Dawes thinks that ‘rationality’ may be anomic, that it may not follow laws that are formally explicable, like the laws of nature [apparently] are. But science, as currently construed, seems constitutionally unable to explore such things.

“Westerners’ models of God has him acting differently”? Erm….http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/05/28/christian-pastor-claims-to-resurrect-man-from-the-dead-but-mans-sister-tells-a-different-story/

I was excluding such cases with my use of ‘Westerners’; it may have been better to talk about what one can respectably say as a scientist in pretty much any meeting of scientists that aren’t explicitly a religious group. I imagine that most ‘educated’ Westerners would say that the behavior at your link “belongs in Africa”, at least if they weren’t afraid of being seen as politically incorrect.

It´s not like the blind men and the elephant… It´s more like a world where elephants are either non-existent or as hidden as God is (if he exists), and where many people try to infer what elephants are like based on ancient and contradictory documents, while others say “guys, have you considered that maybe there is no such thing as an elephant?”

But this seems to be merely an assertion that the convergence I described won’t actually happen. Or, it presupposes a theological belief about how much diversity God would allow—a belief I would question.