DD: What I have is not so much a definition of goodness as an objective approach to discerning goodness. One of the major flaws I see in Lewis’ reasoning is a tendency to assume that “goodness” is defined by a list somewhere, and that’s not really realistic or workable, as I’ve discussed extensively in my discussion of the “Book 1″ portion of Mere Christianity.

Reply: So let me get this straight. You don’t have a definition of goodness, but yet you’re basing your argument on what goodness is. C.S. Lewis was a Thomist. Do you know how Thomism describes goodness? Do you know how Aristotle did? Do you know how that relates to the central doctrine of Thomistic thought, the doctrine of being?

If you do not believe goodness can be described (A more accurate word than defined) then there’s no point in you going on about it and the privation of it, evil.

Hello, Nick, and welcome once again. I’m afraid that you do not quite have things straight yet, but perhaps I can explain myself a bit better. What I’m saying is that Good (as in Good vs. Evil or Right vs Wrong) is not a singular standard with a singular definition. Moral standards are a cultural convention arrived at through a combination of factors including (a) accumulated experience of the consequences of certain things, (b) natural human empathy and (c) sentient self-interest, as they relate to the group in question. There may be other factors as well, but these are the big three.

The reason I did not give you the definition of goodness that you asked for is because your question was too vague. You did not specify any particular social/historical/cultural context, and that’s an important prerequisite for any such definition. Trying to define “Good” without reference to any particular social group is like trying to define marriage without any reference to either of the spouses: it’s not strictly impossible, but it leaves undefined a number of significant variables without which your definition is going to have problems. (More on that below.)

As for Thomistic thought and Aristotle and such, my critique of Lewis is based specifically on the job he does explaining his concept of Moral Law to the average layman, which is why I’m speaking in layman’s terms instead of invoking technical philosophical jargon. If you are suggesting that Lewis’ explanation is misleading, or that it fails to properly explain the topics he is discussing, such that the layman must first master Aquinas and Aristotle before he can properly understand Lewis (!), then perhaps we ought to warn people not to read Mere Christianity, as it will only confuse them.

And lastly, if all you want is a description of goodness, that’s a bit easier. I apologize for the brevity of my first reply, but I’ve got a bit more free time today, so perhaps I can go into more detail. In particular, I’d like to discuss how my understanding of the source of morality is different from (and better than) Lewis’.

The flaw I see in Lewis’ explanation, and in the concepts of natural law and eternal law which underlie it, is that it attempts to reduce the difficult question of Right vs. Wrong down to a relatively simple rule of fiat: somewhere “out there” is a list of things that are always Right/Good, and a list of things that are always Wrong/Evil, and thus morality is merely a matter of finding which list contains the thing you are trying to judge. (For purposes of this discussion it doesn’t matter as much whether this list springs from God’s mind or His will or His nature; the main problem is that it is there at all, by whatever means.)

There is a strong, naive appeal to such a notion. People are always hoping to find an easy, sure-fire way to lose weight, to get rich, to enhance their (*ahem*) “personal characteristics,” and they feel pretty much the same way about any system that offers an easy, sure-fire way to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Screw up morality, and you screw up your life, and people know it, so they’re eager to “buy.” The problem with the “rule of fiat” approach to morality, as it is with other such nostrums, is that it doesn’t actually work in real life.

For example, if there were, somewhere, an eternal law that enumerated all the things that are Good and all the things that are Sin, then that would be an absolute, eternal, and universal constraint. A thing is either right for all people, at all times, in all circumstances, or it is wrong for all people, at all times, in all circumstances. Its moral quality is defined, not by the circumstances attendant on it, but by an independent and extrinsic standard or ideal to which it must relate, and that standard must be arbitrary (i.e. not dependent on circumstances or consequences) or else it is reduced to merely relaying some other, more fundamental source of morality based on circumstances and consequences.

Thus, if genocide is a sin, then it’s a sin even when the Israelites do it; conversely, if it was ok then, it must also be ok now. If suicide is a sin, then it’s a sin for everyone, including those who commit suicide by provoking the Pharisees until they arrange a crucifixion. The rule of fiat is a fixed and absolute morality, not a kind of moral relativism, so it cannot and indeed must not modify its demands to suit some contemporary circumstance or other. But that causes theological problems, because sooner or later God Himself ends up doing something immoral like, say, getting another man’s fiancee pregnant.

The only way to “fix” this hypothetical law is by modifying it so that it becomes contingent upon circumstance: genocide is wrong IF you’re wiping out this group of people rather than that one; suicide is wrong UNLESS you are doing it to benefit someone else, it’s ok to impregnate an unmarried woman IF you are Almighty, etc. In other words, the “eternal law” approach fails unless it is reduced to merely relaying some higher moral standard based on real-world considerations—what we might call the “rule of consequences” as opposed to the rule of fiat. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but like I said, layman’s terms.

In other words, “absolute” goodness sounds good and is easy to sell, but it’s not the ultimate answer. There’s an even deeper and more fundamental source of morality, by which we can judge whether or not the Moral Law needs to be fixed to make it come out right. It’s the difference between theory and practice. In theory, Moral Law is natural law (in the Thomistic sense), but in practice, it is relativism, and we judge the rightness or wrongness of God’s actions by a more flexible standard so that things that would be sin for anyone else are fine for Him. Circumstances and contingencies, and not the inherent rightness or wrongness of the act itself, are the final measure believers use to get God’s conduct to come out “right.”

Lewis’ Moral Law argument suffers from many other, similar flaws, as I’ve discussed over the course of the past several weeks. And it’s not just that Lewis’ argument (and the philosophy behind it) fails to fit the facts, it’s that there exists an alternative that does describe human morality as we observe it in the real world, even among Thomists and other believers, without the caveats and twists and rationalizations that Lewis’ approach requires.

That description, of course, is the one I’ve already alluded to above. Right and Wrong, Good and Evil are social conventions that arise within a certain group based on their perception/consensus regarding which set of consequences they want to encourage and which they want to avoid. It’s complex, changeable, and often results in conflicts between different groups with different moral standards (with one or both sides trying to promote their standard as Eternal and Immutable Law), as we see in action in real life every day.

That’s not a popular description (people like their diet pills and their Ten Commandments) but it’s the objectively accurate one. Like it or not, that’s the way the real world is. Moral standards evolve within particular groups at particular times, and are tied to those groups but not necessarily to others. That’s why, for example, slavery is evil today, and eating pork is not, whereas in Old Testament Israel it was the other way around. Circumstances change, social conventions change, and morality changes right along with them. So you see, I can describe how morality works, but I cannot give you a specific definition of what “good” is, because that definition can be different for different groups at different times. All I (or anyone else) can do is to describe how it works—and my description, unlike Lewis’, accurately matches the way we see real morality function in real life.

DD: As to your second question, I have a feeling you’re leading up to something by the reference to “goodness in relation to being,” but I’m not sure what exactly you have in mind.

Reply: Correct. If you are not sure what I have in mind, then it’s time to learn. If you do not know this concept, then it’s really difficult to take the account seriously. Of course, if you want to learn an accurate description, I’m ready to give it.

I’m sure I and my readers would be glad to hear it. Share, by all means, what you know.

DD: I do have a few decades of experience as an evangelical, Bible-believing conservative Christian, so I am fairly comfortable with my understanding of how Christians see “goodness.”

Reply: No you’re not. I’m not talking about how Christians see goodness. It’s irrelevant to me. Goodness is what it is regardless of if Christians see it and goodness had an ontology before Christianity came along. I’m talking about what it is and I don’t need the Bible for that or the revelation of God at all.

Good for you! I don’t need the Bible either, with the caveat that we are entitled to examine any book that claims to be inspired by the Author of that ontology, to see if its claims are consistent with itself and with the real world evidence. As I’m sure you would agree.

By the way, I apologize for misunderstanding which group you were thinking of when you said “Lewis and others,” but you’ll have to admit you were a bit vague there. I’m glad to see that you’ve been more specific in your response.

DD: No doubt you could find a point or two to quibble over, but I daresay you could do the same with any number of believers as well, so I’m not worried about falling outside the mainstream.

Reply: You bet I could because sadly, most Christians don’t even know this due to the dumbing down of the church that leads to the apostasy you’ve just described yourself as fulfilling. You didn’t know about goodness then and you still don’t now.

I’m afraid you have jumped to a false conclusion there; I hope that was unintentional. If you can address the points I’ve raised, then I would encourage you to do so. Anyone who merely wishes to indulge in innuendo and premature boasting, without demonstrating an awareness and understanding of opposing arguments, would risk coming across as ignorant and obstinate. That applies to me as much as to you, naturally.

I think the most productive approach would be for each of us to attempt to address the points under discussion as they are raised, and if there is any relevant argument or information that has not yet been raised, we should raise it, and actually see if the other party is familiar with it before drawing any conclusions about their level of knowledge. Fair enough? I have addressed the points raised by Lewis in his book, just as you are free and welcome to address the points I raise in my posts. And if you feel like there’s anything Lewis said in the first several chapters that I’ve overlooked, and/or that I’ve incorrectly omitted in order to make spurious claims of ignorance on Lewis’ part, feel free to point those out as well, and I will gladly correct any errors that warrant correction.

DD: If you think I’ve missed anything important, feel free to share.

Reply: Just the big picture and an education on what you’re talking about. You don’t have a working idea of what goodness is and you aren’t interacting with the metaphysics that C.S. Lewis held to, which would be a good Thomistic metaphysics.

You seem to have rather strong feelings on the subject. Are you by any chance letting these feelings bias your conclusions? That would explain why you seem to think you’ve plumbed the full extent of my knowledge even before we’ve started, as it were. And that would indeed be a shame. Still, I’m glad you showed up and gave me the opportunity to explore the topic a little further. The Lewis book was very disappointing, and you’ve made the discussion a lot more lively. Thanks much.

A commenter writes:

Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

Yes, and I’ll take it a step further: belief in reality requires a stronger and better faith than belief in superstition. And those who embrace the truth have a stronger and better faith than Christians do, because Christian faith is mere gullibility, whereas genuine faith is based on real-world truth.

The commenter is writing from a perspective of Universal Agnosticism (see? I told you it would come up):

The term ‘reality’ is relative…

Again, truth is not really known. You cannot prove that God isn’t there. If you could, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because there would be nothing to discuss. Therefore, truth is not defined. I do love truth and BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that the God that I call on IS TRUTH. You apparently BELIEVE or HAVE FAITH that TRUTH is something else. I’m not disputing the fact that you believe something. But, neither of us will be able to truly claim that we know until we’re both dead.

His viewpoint, of course, is suffering from a serious defect, which is that according to his definitions, the truth about God is not humanly knowable. In order for that to be true, however, it would necessarily have to be equally true that none of the things he believes about God, and none of the things the Bible says about God, are actually based on any knowledge of the truth. By his own definitions, the meaningful content of his faith cannot be anything more than pure, unfounded fantasy. He manages to escape from the inevitable conflict between his faith and the real world, but he does so at the expense of abandoning reality and thus rendering his own believes irrelevant to the truth.

Hence the quick change of subject:

Rather than just participating in pointless tit-for-tat…lets get back to the idea that I originally posted: Belief in the existence of God or belief that there is no god requires faith.

I suppose he would be a bit surprised to find that I agree, and I also agree with the title of the book by Geisler and Turek which is the current subject of XFiles Friday: I Don’t Have Enough FAITH to Be an ATHEIST. What’s interesting is that both the commenter and the authors are trying to prove the same point: they are trying to weaken the case for a reality-based view by implying that it is a matter of faith rather than a matter of fact and knowledge. In making this appeal, they reveal the weaknesses of their own concept of faith, and their lack of familiarity with reality-based faith.

Reality-based faith has three elements. First and foremost, reality-based faith is based on a broad experience of reality. Our experiences in the real world give us a solid foundation on which to base our faith. For example, we have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow because we have a broad, solid experience of seeing the sun rise every morning (or for some of us, at least seeing that the sun has managed to make it up above the horizon again while we were sleeping). The “confidence quotient” of our faith is based on having seen and experienced that which we are putting our trust in.

Secondly, reality-based faith is built on embracing the real-world truth. Experiencing reality is not always enough. We must also embrace it, which means that, in the negative sense, we must not try to deny reality, and in the positive sense, we must accept it and understand it as best we can. We want a solid, well-founded faith, and that means that the intellectual content of our faith needs to match the reality that it is based on. Otherwise, our faith will be out of step with reality, and thus ill-founded and unlikely to bring us the benefits that come from having a well-founded faith.

Lastly, reality-based faith must positively affirm that which we believe. This is perhaps the most obvious aspect of faith, but it is not the sole aspect of genuine faith. Genuine faith means you experience the real-world truth, then you embrace the real-world truth, and lastly you affirm the real-world truth. This is a strong, well-founded, and reliable faith.

Superstitious faiths, like Christianity for instance, have a much weaker faith that’s built upside down. In Christianity, someone first affirms a dogma. Then the believer embraces the dogma. Then lastly, the believer tries to get his real-world experience to match the content of his beliefs. It’s a lot of work, and the results are often frustrating and confusing. When the believer is intelligent and intellectually honest, like the commenter, very often the result is that they clearly see the need to make a choice between denying reality and denying Christianity–the conflicts between the two are simply too pervasive and too irreconcilable to embrace them both. And far too often, the believer will choose to deny reality, as the commenter does, rather than give up their superstitious and ill-founded “faith.”

Why do you say that? I realize we don’t have a lot to go on, but I thought it was pretty well established that the Sadducees didn’t believe in life after death.

I was only able to give a cursory reply in the comments, and indeed my early research did more to raise my own doubts than to confirm my initial statement (hence the edit to my original post). Now that I’ve looked into it a bit more, though, I’m a bit more confident in my initial assessment, and so I thought I’d take some time to share my findings.

One of the first sources I found online (for easier sharing) was the book Pharisees, Scribes and Sadducees in Palestinian Society, by Anthony Saldarini. Saldarini says,

The testimony of all the sources that the Sadducees did not believe in resurrection, afterlife and judgment fits the other things we know about them and is historically reliable and convincing. The Sadducees’ belief is the traditional Biblical view; ideas of resurrection, immortality and afterlife entered Judaism in the second century B. C. E. and only gradually dominated Judaism over the next four or five centuries. [footnote: See George W. E. Nicklesburg, Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (HThSt 26; Cambridge: HUP, 1972). Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1, from about 200 C. E. still has a stricture against those who deny resurrection of the dead; later talmudic comments on this passage speak not of those who deny resurrection of the dead, but who deny that it can be proved from Scripture.]

This is clearly not fundamentalist Christian propaganda, since it alludes to new doctrines being introduced into Judaism in the second century BC (and used the secular “BCE” instead of the Christian “BC”). If this is the case, and “the testimony of all the sources” says that the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, then it certainly sounds like my initial claim was wrong. But let’s keep digging.

One site I visited brought up an important point about our sources of information regarding the Sadducees.

The most reliable information about the Sadducees is found in three bodies of ancient literature: the writings of Flavius Josephus…; the NT, particularly the Synoptic Gospels and Acts…; and the rabbinic compilations… Two observations about these sources should be made. First, with the possible exception of Josephus’ War, all these sources are decidedly hostile towards the Sadducees. Second, many of the rabbinic references, especially those found in the Talmud and later works, are of doubtful historical reliability. Thus, our knowledge of the Sadducees is perforce severely limited and one-sided.

In other words, all of the reports we have today about Sadducean beliefs were written by people who wanted to discredit those beliefs. A similar example from modern culture might be the way the pro-life movement habitually refers to their opponents, not as “pro-choice”, but as “pro-abortion.” Or if you prefer, you could use the example of pro-choice supporters referring to pro-lifers as “anti-abortion,” though of course that’s a bit less of a distortion.

The point is, belief in life after death is one of the most ancient and pervasive beliefs that the human species (and possibly some near-human species) have ever possessed. If the Pharisees could plausibly accuse the Sadducees of denying one of the most fundamental and widespread of human religious beliefs, it would create a significant popular prejudice against them. Considering that the Pharisees settled their theological debate with Jesus by having him put to death, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that they might indulge in a little old-fashioned politicking as a means to achieving their ends. But could they get away with it?

In fact, it’s not all that difficult. All you need to do is create a definition of “afterlife” that’s different from what the Sadducees believe, get them to agree that they don’t accept that definition, and hey-ho, you can now claim that they don’t believe in the afterlife. If they say, “Yes we do, we believe in X,” you can reply, “Well, X is not the real afterlife, so you still don’t believe in the real afterlife.”

That’s my hypothesis anyway. Let’s check the evidence and if it’s consistent. Here’s a quote from the book Christian Beliefs and Teachings, by John C. Meyer.

[The Sadducees] did not believe in the resurrection of the dead nor the existence of angels. They embraced the traditional Jewish idea of Sheol for those who had died. Sheol was the gloomy and shadowy underworld for departed spirits.

Notice, the Sadducees did believe in an afterlife: they believed that when you died, your spirit departed into a place called Sheol, where it remained forever in the gloom and darkness. Next, from the book Body, Soul and Life Everlasting, by John W. Cooper, we have these observations.

The Israelites believed that identifiable though truncated human persons continue to exist after death. True to their holism, they thought of the dead as ethereal bodily beings who remain in Sheol. Whether they are in any sense conscious and active is unclear. Though Sheol is the gathering place of all human dead, there are hints that the lot of the faithful and the wicked is not the same. Hope is expressed that the Lord will rescue his beloved from death itself. At least two texts refer to bodily resurrection. But the predominant picture is of the rephaim in Sheol…

Consider first the most austere view, that even the believing dead remain forever in the silence of Sheol. Like the Psalmist and the Preacher, Sirach laments: “Who will sing praises to the Most High in Hades, as do those who are alive and give thanks? From the dead, as from one who does not exist, thanksgiving has ceased…” (Sir. 17:27-28a, RSV). Even if a strict nonexistence is not what is envisioned here, those who inhabit Sheol are so cut off from life and from God that they might as well be extinct.

This is most likely also the position of the Sadducees, whom we meet in the New Testament. There they are best known for their denial of the resurrection. But they are also supposed to have affirmed annihilation or ontological nothingness after death. This interpretation is confirmed by Josephus, who likens the Sadducees to Epicurean materialists in denying existence after death. The claim that they adopted materialist Greek philosophy is certainly consistent with their reputation as promoters of Greco-Roman political and cultural values. But Russell considers them to be faithful adherents of the Old Testament conception of Sheol, which does not include annihilation, strictly speaking. Perhaps there were Sadducees of both sorts, Hebrew and Greek, or a synthesis of traditions.

Interestingly, C. S. Lewis also presents the Sadducees as believing in a rather diminished existence in Sheol after death. That’s sufficiently different from the Pharisaic view of  afterlife, in which the good go to Abraham’s bosom and the evil (and wealthy) go to a place of torment, awaiting resurrection and God’s final judgment (as in the story of Lazarus). Sure, the dead go to Sheol, but you call that an afterlife? That’s not the kind of afterlife the Pharisees preached, and therefore you could say that they “did not believe in the afterlife [in the Pharisaic sense].” Just leave the parenthetical remark as a silent implication, and you have the report that the Sadducees did not believe in the afterlife, period.

Another interesting point I found in my reading was that those who say the Sadducees denied the afterlife claim that they did so because it was not written in the Torah (i.e. the Law, the first 5 books of the Old Testament). Here’s blogger James Prather:

The Sadducees only held that the Torah was inspired, and rejected the prophets and the writings as God-breathed inspired scripture (the Pharisees held that it was all inspired, as do Christians today. And yes, I know that’s an oversimplification, but there’s no need to get into the canonical debate of the first century in this post).  Furthermore the Sadducees did not believe in the resurrection or life after death because it’s not explicitly stated in the Torah.  And so in order to discuss topics such as the afterlife with the Sadducees, the Pharisees tried to prove the concept from the Torah itself.

This, of course, would explain why Jesus skipped over more explicit references to resurrection in the Prophets, and tried to prove the resurrection of the dead to the Sadducees using Exodus 3:6. But notice what we’re saying here. We’re saying that not only did the original Hebrew religion lack any kind of doctrine of bodily resurrection, but it even failed to mention what the Pharisees called “afterlife!” It’s not just the Sadducees who lacked any teaching of the afterlife, it’s Moses as well!

And yet, belief in Sheol is even older than Moses, and is mentioned explicitly in the Torah seven times. Thus, even if the Sadducees did reject what the Pharisees called “afterlife,” on the grounds that it was not explicitly taught by the Torah, the same cannot be said for their belief in the older, more traditional view of Sheol as the abode of the spirits of the dead.

At this point, I’m prepared to stand by my original claim that the Sadducees in general did indeed believe that at death, the soul continues to exist, and departs to an afterlife (of sorts) in Sheol, despite Pharisaic attempts to portray them as annihilationists, and despite the possibility that individual Sadducees may indeed have absorbed Greek philosophical materialism into their personal religion. I’d discount the latter group, because if you’re going to become a Greek materialist, you’ve got no particular interest in books of laws supposedly dictated by immaterial gods, and therefore you’re not really part of the debate between Jesus and the Sadducees. What we’ve got in Matthew 22 are a bunch of Sadducees who already believed that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were in Sheol, and in that context, the only way Jesus’ answer even remotely makes sense is if they also believed that Sheol was ruled over by a different god than Yahweh.

Well, I’m back, sort of, and from the looks of things you guys didn’t miss me too much. I don’t suppose I’ll ever catch up on the comments backlog, but I’m sure you will let me know if there are any important points I’ve missed in my quick skim.

Meanwhile, I did notice this interesting comment (stuck in the moderation queue) from a commenter by the handle of “Lifeguard.”

I guess what I’m struggling with here is what the exact difference is between the Loser’s Compromise and simply acknowledging the very real possibility that despite the certainty of your beliefs you may be mistaken about which conclusion is the most justified, the best of the bunch, to say nothing of absolutely proven to be true?

That’s an excellent question, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to explain this further.

There’s a big difference between the Loser’s Compromise and the reasonable practice of acknowledging a certain margin for error in one’s conclusions. In the latter, the goal is to keep one’s mind open in order to be receptive to receiving new information that might change one’s conclusions. The goal of the Loser’s Compromise, by contrast, is to deprive us of the ability to benefit from new information, or even already existing information. The loss of this ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood is precisely what makes it a “Loser’s” Compromise—we’re trying to lose a faculty we could otherwise use to learn that our beliefs are already false.

The Loser’s Compromise is, in effect, the exact opposite of admitting that there’s a real possibility we could be wrong. If we are wrong, the only way we’ll ever find out is by noticing that the evidence is inconsistent with the conclusions we wish to believe. The whole point of the Loser’s Compromise, however, is to make the evidence sound equally consistent with all conclusions, thus causing us to lose the ability to identify incorrect conclusions.

The feature that makes the Loser’s Compromise stand out as a rationalization, and that betrays the compromiser’s motives, is when we try to use the Loser’s Compromise to claim that we have a justification for our beliefs, despite the fact no such justification exists. If the evidence fails to favor one conclusion over the others, then they are all equally UNjustified, not equally justified. That’s an important distinction, because when the evidence is uniformly ambiguous, the only position that can be legitimately justified is agnosticism, not belief.

Now, there may indeed be circumstances in which the available evidence is insufficient to distinguish between different possible conclusions. I would not use the term “Loser’s Compromise” in such situations, provided that we were openly agnostic about our conclusions and that we were actively seeking more evidence and information with the goal of ultimately discovering which answers were right and which were wrong. The term “Loser’s Compromise” only applies to the specific case of trying to make the existing evidence sound inconclusive, via arguments intended to deny or distort the facts, in order to avoid acknowledging a clear inconsistency between the available facts and a particular conclusion.

So yes, I endorse the practice of acknowledging the possibility that one’s conclusions might be incorrect, and that new information might invalidate previously-held beliefs. I myself could be wrong about heliocentrism, or about God, though at this point I’d say the odds would appear to be about equal in either case. Acknowledging the possibility of error is a good thing, but it’s the exact opposite of what the Loser’s Compromise attempts to accomplish—lip service to human fallibility notwithstanding.

RC is making the claim that my Gospel Hypothesis is not valid because it cannot be constructed via propositional logic.

DD said:

There’s no requirement that hypotheses must be formed by propositional logic. We just need to be able to predict what consequences would result from the situation described.

Sorry, I disagree, A testable hypothesis (which is the hypothesis at hand) must be valid in terms of propositional logic. You stated it yourself,

Not all statements make valid hypotheses, however. “Loki works in mysterious ways” is a statement that really covers just about any possible outcome. We can’t really look at, say, today’s weather report and tell whether it supports or refutes the statement that Loki works in mysterious ways. Likewise, inherently self-contradictory statements are untestable. If we say “Childless unmarried spouses have healthier children,” we’re not going to be able to describe an observable set of consequences against which we could compare the evidence.

The reason these hypotheses are invalid is because they cannot be correctly described using propositional logic.

You gave good examples, you just forgot some other failures, such as tautology and non sequeter.

Tautology and non-sequitur, however, are fallacies that describe incorrect conclusions, not incorrect premises. I think what’s happening here is that RC is getting a little ahead of the game and is trying to draw conclusions before we’re done defining the premises.

Reality itself is not formed by propositional logic, so it makes no sense to insist that we can only make hypotheses that are restricted to propositional logic alone.

I agree absolutely that reality is not governed by propositional logic, or any logic at all for that matter.

But hypotheses are not reality, they are a tool used by humans to reach truths about reality. Reality is not governed by the set of natural numbers either, but I cannot throw out their definition when using them as a tool.

Well, I phrased that badly. What I meant was that there is no sense in requiring the latter portions of a hypothesis to be logically derived from earlier portions. Or to put it a different way, it makes no sense to take the rules that apply to the complete process of drawing conclusions based on premises, and try to inject them into the preliminary process of defining what your premises are so that you can draw conclusions from them. That’s like insisting that all new aircraft have to pass a test flight before you’re allowed to attach the wings. If you haven’t added the wings yet, it’s not time for the test flight.

I think the reason you are missing my point is that in the rush to reach your conclusion, you are combining several hypothesis that are not independent, and thereby leaping over intrinsic problems. You did it again with your example in your last comment:

For example, if I propose a hypothesis that President Obama is a hologram and not a real person, on the basis of a weird dream and a strong subjective feeling, my basis for proposing the hypothesis is purely bogus. Yet the hypothesis is testable nonetheless: if he’s a mere hologram, you can walk through him and even see through him. It has testable consequences, despite its spurious origin, and therefore can still be a valid hypothesis.

Is the hypothesis that Obama is a hologram, or Obama not a real person? If I prove he is not a hologram, have a said anything about whether he is a real person?

Here I think is the point at which RC and I part ways in our thinking. To my way of looking at it, I am combining qualifiers in order to construct a more-specified hypothesis, i.e. one that is distinguishable from a broader group of similar hypotheses. I’m not just testing whether Obama is a hologram, and I’m not just testing whether he’s a real person, I’m investigating a more specific condition: whether some unknown agency is using holograms to simulate a non-existent president. By combining qualifiers, I can create a hypothesis that resembles one or more broader categories of hypotheses, while being distinguishable, in each case, from the broader category.

RC seems to be saying that there is some rule against using compound qualifiers to define a more-specific hypothesis, and/or some rule that says a hypothesis can only contain a single specifier and that additional specifiers are required to be derived from the first via valid propositional logic.

I don’t think there is any such restriction on how we define our hypotheses. I believe that it is perfectly legitimate to declare complex, testable hypotheses like, for example the hypothesis that Newtonian physics correctly describes phenomena above the atomic level and at speeds substantially less than the speed of light, while Einsteinian physics correctly describes phenomena below the subatomic level and at speeds approaching the speed of light, with more complex interactions of both physics near the boundaries between the two pairs of domains.

That’s a pretty complicated hypothesis, combining a number of compound specifiers that cannot be obtained by applying propositional logic to the other specifiers within the hypothesis. I believe it would be an even better example than the Gospel Hypothesis of something that ought to fail RC’s standards for a valid hypothesis. Yet if it cannot be a valid hypothesis, then it can never be tested, and thus can never describe a valid scientific conclusion. This would be rather a shock to a large number of physicists.

Here is your Gospel Hypothesis, broken down:

1. There exists an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving Creator.

This is not a hypothesis, this is a definition: There can be only one Creator meeting these criteria, no lesser being qualifies.

A hypothesis is a definition. It defines the condition(s) that we’re going to compare against the real-world evidence in order to draw conclusions about whether the hypothetical description of the condition(s) is true. And notice, this is a compound definition: you cannot use propositional logic to derive the part that says “He is all-wise” from the part that says “He is all-knowing”, or “He is a Creator” from “He is all-loving”. Why am I allowed to combine these specifiers, which are not derived from one another, but not allowed to combine other specifiers on the grounds that they’re not mutually logically derived?

2. [He] wants a genuine, personal, eternal relationship with each of us.

This is a hypothesis, not derived form the basis (1). Since it is a non sequeter, it is one of an almost infinite number of hypotheses one could make not pertaining to the attributes of all-powerful, etc.

This looks to me like sequential processing. The Gospel Hypothesis is 1 (one) hypothesis, not a series of hypotheses derived from one another. In fact, you don’t derive hypotheses from hypotheses, you derive conclusions from hypotheses. Those conclusions may suggest further hypotheses, but each new hypothesis is independent from any hypotheses which may have preceded it. This is necessarily the case, because we need to be unbiased when considering whether or not the new hypothesis is true. Otherwise we run the risk of attaching the success of the earlier conclusion to the new, untested hypothesis, and thus reaching an unjustified conclusion in favor of the new hypothesis.

Your criteria for the choice of this hypothesis, is your next hypothesis:
3. He is willing and able to become one of us, dwell among us for a time, and then die for us so that we can be together forever

You see the problem already. You have biased the hypothetical structure towards the outcome you want.

No, what I’ve done is to specify the precise condition I wish to test. This is a perfectly valid approach, because the more specific our hypothesis, the more precisely we can measure how consistent the real-world facts are with that specific hypothesis. What’s more, this is a highly commendable approach, because it allows us to test multiple similar hypotheses that differ only in certain specific details, giving us the ability to extract much more detailed and fine-grained information from the available evidence.

The key point here is that specifying the hypothesis in no way constrains the evidence itself. It’s futile to try and bias a hypothesis, because when you get to the part where you compare the hypothesis to the evidence, the evidence is either going to be consistent with the consequences of the hypothesis (in which case we’re justified in concluding that the hypothesis is true) or it’s going to be inconsistent with the hypothesis (in which case we’re justified in rejecting it). That’s why the scientific method has been so successful in allowing biased and imperfect humans to discover genuine real-world truth.

Let’s suppose, for example, that we get all racist and say, “All members of <insert ethnic group here> have smaller brains than members of <insert our own ethnic group here>.” If you wanted a biased hypothesis, it would have to look something like that. But what happens when you take that hypothesis and test it by measuring the brain size of both ethnic groups? The expected consequence that follows from the biased hypothesis is that there will be a significant correlation between ethnicity and measured brain size. If the measurements are consistent with this hypothesis, then it’s true, and if not, then it’s false. The bias of the hypothesis itself is irrelevant.

If you think about it, every hypothesis is “biased,” since it asserts the truth of a proposition that might be either true or false. The point is that we don’t just accept that bias. We test it, and decide its truth or falsehood based on whether or not the condition described is consistent with what we find in the real world.

The basis for hypothesis (3) is unproven hypothesis (2), not the basis (1). Convenient, but as someone who has spent quite a few hours trying for program computers in ML (a propositional logic programming language), you can expect only halts.

As I’ve pointed out before, though, I don’t have 3 separate hypotheses derived from one another. I have one hypothesis that is highly specified, through the application of compound qualifiers. The rules RC says I’m breaking are rules that apply to the process of drawing conclusions based on the premises, but you can’t start that process until your premises have been defined, and all I’m doing in stating the Gospel Hypothesis is defining what the premise (singular) is. I want to test for a highly specific condition, and therefore my hypothesis requires a corresponding specificity.

So bad logic, and yet I agree you have reached the correct conclusion. This is I think, because we have lots of empirical data that support your description of the Christian dilemma, and a real dilemma it is. The entire field of apologetics exists not because of some philosophical argument, but because the data shows a real problem for the Christian philosophy.

At least we both agree on the main thing. My apologies to RC for picking apart his comment, but I felt like I needed to the reasons for my technique.

The Big Bang theory says that time, space, and matter/energy all originate in the same singularity, not that they all originate in “nothing.”
And I’ve seen several philosopher make the case that such a singularity is ontologically equivalent to nothing. You are just question begging.

Because time and the material universe had the same origin, it can truthfully be said that the universe has no “beginning,” since there was never a time when it did not exist.
“Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.” (Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time,)
I think I’ll go with what the expert physicists say.

I’ll go with what the expert physicists say too. The catch is that sometimes, when writing for a non-technical audience, you have to sacrifice strict technical accuracy in favor of readability. That’s why meteorologists, despite being heliocentrists, will say, “The sun will rise at 6:52 am” instead of saying “At 6:42 am the earth will have rotated to a position relative to the sun such that a line between the sun and the eye of an observer of average height will no longer intersect the body of the earth.” Though the latter version is more technically correct, it is so needlessly complex that it actually obscures the information we’re most interested in knowing.

When Hawking and Penrose speak of the “beginning” of space and time, they’re speaking informally, for readability’s sake. For casual conversation, or a layman’s introduction to advanced physics, that’s ok. Where it gets tricky is when you start to think about what the phrase “beginning of time” might mean, because a beginning is a kind of chronological transition. In other words, when we say that a thing begins, what we mean is that a certain point in time, the thing does not exist, and then at some subsequent point in time, it does exist.

That’s our normal, intuitive perception of what a “beginning” is. We don’t even need to think about it, because we’re so familiar with “beginning” being a chronological transition. If the thing we’re talking about is time itself, however, then our normal, intuitive perception breaks down, because in order for time to begin, in the sense that we mean “beginning,” we must assume that at one point in time, time did not exist, and then at some subsequent point in time, it did exist. But that means that part of our argument involves assuming that time existed when time did not exist—a self-contradictory premise.

What Hawking and Penrose are talking about is not a “beginning of time” in the ordinary chronological sense, but rather an absolute minimum value for time. Stephen Hawking uses the example of the North Pole, 90 degrees north latitude. If you travel to the north pole by dog sled, you will find that you cannot travel north of the north pole. Obtaining more powerful transportation, like a snowmobile or a big snow rig, or even a jet or a rocket of some kind, will not help. It’s not a question of needing more power, it’s a question of there being no more “north” to go to. It just isn’t there.

Likewise with the beginning of time. It’s not that we can’t go back before the beginning of time because we lack power, or that we could travel back before the beginning of time if we were omnipotent, it’s that there’s no “before the beginning” to go back to. “What’s before the beginning of time?” is like “What’s north of the North Pole?” or “What is your speed when you come to an absolute stop and then slow down?” We can assemble the words into phrases that sound like they mean something, but there’s nothing real for them to refer to.

As for the unnamed philosophers who make the case that the singularity is “the ontological equivalent of nothing,” I have to say that’s a fascinating refutation of Geisler and Turek’s argument. The singularity referred to in the Big Bang theory is a construct whose properties are defined by the answer to the question, “What do you get when you follow natural cause-and-effect relationships back as far as they will go?” It is therefore one of the properties of the singularity that it is the origin of the entire space-time continuum that we know as our cosmos, by definition. “Singularity” is simply the label we put on the list of qualities that would have to come at the beginning of all natural causal chains.

Thus, to the extent that these philosophers are proving that the universe has its origin in “the ontological equivalent of nothing,” they are refuting Geisler and Turek’s claim that it is not possible for something to come from nothing. Of course, Geisler and Turek could argue back that these philosophers are simply wrong, and that the phrase “ontological equivalent of nothing” is mere philosophical double-talk and vapid sophistry.

For myself, I’m content to leave this particular argument to Geisler and Turek versus Facilis’ philosophers, because it’s all moot anyway. The universe has no cause, since there has never been a time when the universe did not exist. It is entirely pointless to bicker over whether it was caused by something or caused by nothing or caused by the ontological equivalent of nothing. It was not caused.

Cause and effect are concepts that assume the existence of time. The cause of an effect must happen before the effect, and “before” is a chronological relationship. The cause occurs at one point in time, and then at some subsequent point in time, the effect occurs. If Event A happens after Event B, or even at the exact same instant as B, then A is not the cause of B. The cause and effect relationship depends on which point in time corresponds to which event. Since time must already exist in order for there to be points in time, it is not possible for time to have a cause. And since time and the rest of the material universe all share the same point of origin, there is no point in time when any cause could have happened that would have created the cosmos.

Consequently, while time and the universe have the same origin, they do not, strictly speaking, have what we would normally call a “beginning,” and thus no cause. It is quite literally true that the material universe has existed for all of time and that there has never been any time when it did not exist. So add the “First Cause” argument to the list of failed Christian apologetics. It just isn’t consistent with real world truth.