"Lars Eighner" <eighner@io.com> wrote in message

There is not such time as "before the big bang." Just like
the north pole is as far north as you can go, the big bang
is as "before" as you can go. Saying you don't know what
came before the big bang is about the same as saying you
don't know what is north of north. It is nonsense.

Something "banged" - matter, energy. That something had to be there
before it could "bang." "Before" is a reference to time. So if
something "banged" and that something was there "before" it could bang,
then there was, indeed, a time "before the big bang." Unless you think
that maybe "god" just pulled it out of his butt.

"Lars Eighner" <eighner@io.com> wrote in message
news:slrnbu498p.kfd.eighner@pearl.io.com...

There is not such time as "before the big bang." Just like
the north pole is as far north as you can go, the big bang
is as "before" as you can go. Saying you don't know what
came before the big bang is about the same as saying you
don't know what is north of north. It is nonsense.

Something "banged" - matter, energy. That something had to be there before
it could "bang." "Before" is a reference to time. So if something "banged"
and that something was there "before" it could bang, then there was, indeed,
a time "before the big bang." Unless you think that maybe "god" just pulled
it out of his butt.

"Lars Eighner" <

There is not such time as "before the big bang." Just like
the north pole is as far north as you can go, the big bang
is as "before" as you can go. Saying you don't know what
came before the big bang is about the same as saying you
don't know what is north of north. It is nonsense.

Something "banged" - matter, energy.

That something had to be there before it could "bang."

"Before" is a reference to time. So if something "banged"
and that something was there "before" it could bang, then there was, indeed,
a time "before the big bang."

Unless you think that maybe "god" just pulled it out of his butt.

"Lars Eighner" <eighner@io.com> wrote in message
news:slrnbu498p.kfd.eighner@pearl.io.com...

There is not such time as "before the big bang." Just like
the north pole is as far north as you can go, the big bang
is as "before" as you can go. Saying you don't know what
came before the big bang is about the same as saying you
don't know what is north of north. It is nonsense.

Something "banged" - matter, energy. That something had to be there before
it could "bang." "Before" is a reference to time. So if something "banged"
and that something was there "before" it could bang, then there was, indeed,
a time "before the big bang." Unless you think that maybe "god" just pulled
it out of his butt.

Unless you think that maybe "god" just pulled
it out of his butt.

On 17 Dec 2003 00:11:14 -0800,

The atheist's assertion that matter/energy is eternal is
scientifically wrong. The biblical assertion that there was a
beginning is scientifically correct.

How can science opine about stuff pre-singularity?

Isn't the theory that we can't observe such a thing because all we
observe got a complete shuffle at the big bang? Isn't a "singularity"
a complete shuffle of the deck such that the newly dealt cards tell us
nothing about the previous hands?

Science counts cards so you can predict which card will likely come up
next. The current count doesn't help you bet on the hands before the
last shuffle.

Truth Journal
Theism, Atheism, and Rationality
Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga has been called "the most important philosopher of
religion now writing."

taught at Wayne State University (1958-63), Calvin College (1963-82),
and has filled the John A. O'Brien Chair of Philosophy at the
University of Notre Dame since 1982. He was president of the Western
Division of the American Philosophical Association during 1981-82 and
president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which he helped to
found, from 1983 to 1986. He frequently directs summer seminars for
the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has received numerous
honors, including an Award for Distinguished Teaching from the
Danforth Foundation, a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies
in the Behavioral Sciences, a fellowship from the Guggenheim
Foundation, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, separate fellowships from the N.E.H., and a fellowship from
the American Council of Learned Societies. He has been awarded an
honorary doctorate from Glasgow University. He has been invited to
deliver more distinguished lectures series at American, Canadian, and
British universities than can be listed here, except to note that he
was selected to give the eminent Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen
University in 1987-88. He was recently honored by a volume of essays
bearing his name in D. Reidel's Profiles series. Widely acclaimed for
his work on the metaphysics of modality, the ontological argument, the
problem of evil, and the epistemology of religious belief, he is the
author or editor of seven books, including God and Other Minds, The
Nature of Necessity, and Faith and Rationality. Several of his
articles, which have appeared in journals such as Theoria, American
Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Journal of Philosophy,
and so forth, have been hailed as masterpieces of the metaphysician's
craft.

Atheological objections to the belief that there is such a person as
God come in many varieties. There are, for example, the familiar
objections that theism is somehow incoherent, that it is inconsistent
with the existence of evil, that it is a hypothesis ill-confirmed or
maybe even disconfirmed by the evidence, that modern science has
somehow cast doubt upon it, and the like. Another sort of objector
claims, not that theism is incoherent or false or probably false
(after all, there is precious little by way of cogent argument for
that conclusion) but that it is in some way unreasonable or irrational
to believe in God, even if that belief should happen to be true. Here
we have, as a centerpiece, the evidentialist objection to theistic
belief. The claim is that none of the theistic arguments-deductive,
inductive, or abductive-is successful; hence there is at best
insufficient evidence for the existence of God. But then the belief
that there is such a person as God is in some way intellectually
improper-somehow foolish or irrational. A person who believed without
evidence that there are an even number of ducks would be believing
foolishly or irrationally; the same goes for the person who believes
in God without evidence. On this view, one who accepts belief in God
but has no evidence for that belief is not, intellectually speaking,
up to snuff. Among those who have offered this objection are Antony
Flew, Brand Blanshard, and Michael Scriven. Perhaps more important is
the enormous oral tradition: one finds this objection to theism
bruited about on nearly any major university campus in the land. The
objection in question has also been endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who
was once asked what he would say if, after dying, he were brought into
the presence of God and asked whyhe had not been a believer. Russell's
reply: "I'd say, 'Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!'" I'm
not sure just how that reply would be received; but my point is only
that Russell, like many others, has endorsed this evidentialist
objection to theistic belief.
Now what, precisely, is the objector's claim here? He holds that the
theist without evidence is irrational or unreasonable; what is the
property with which he is crediting such a theist when he thus
describes him? What, exactly, or even approximately, does he mean when
he says that the theist without evidence is irrational? Just what, as
he sees it, is the problem with such a theist? The objection can be
seen as taking at least two forms; and there are at least two
corresponding senses or conceptions of rationality lurking in the
nearby bushes. According to the first, a theist who has no evidence
has violated an intellectual or cognitive duty of some sort. He has
gone contrary to an obligation laid upon him-perhaps by society, or
perhaps by his own nature as a creature capable of grasping
propositions and holding beliefs. There is an obligation or something
like an obligation to proportion one's beliefs to the strength of the
evidence. Thus according to John Locke, a mark of a rational person is
"the not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the
proof it is built upon will warrant," and according to David Hume, "A
wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."

In the nineteenth century we have W.K. Clifford, that "delicious
enfant terrible" as William James called him, insisting that it is
monstrous, immoral, and perhaps even impolite to accept a belief for
which you have insufficient evidence:


Whoso would deserve well of his fellow in this matter will guard the
purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at
any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which
can never be wiped away.[1]
He adds that if a

belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a
stolen one. Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of
power which we do not really possess, but it is sinful, stolen in
defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from
such beliefs as from a pestilence, which may shortly master our body
and spread to the rest of the town. [2]
And finally:

To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe
anything upon insufficient evidence.[3]
(It is not hard to detect, in these quotations, the "tone of
robustious pathos" with which James credits Clifford.) On this view
theists without evidence-my sainted grandmother, for example-are
flouting their epistemic duties and deserve our disapprobation and
disapproval. Mother Teresa, for example, if she has not arguments for
her belief in God, then stands revealed as a sort of intellectual
libertine-someone who has gone contrary to her intellectual
obligations and is deserving of reproof and perhaps even disciplinary
action.
Now the idea that there are intellectual duties or obligations is
difficult but not implausible, and I do not mean to question it here.
It is less plausible, however, to suggest that I would or could be
going contrary to my intellectual duties in believing, without
evidence, that there is such a person as God. For first, my beliefs
are not, for the most part, within my control. If, for example, you
offer me $1,000,000 to cease believing that Mars is smaller than
Venus, there is no way I can collect. But the same holds for my belief
in God: even if I wanted to, I couldn't-short of heroic measures like
coma inducing drugs-just divest myself of it. (At any rate there is
nothing I can do directly; perhaps there is a sort of regimen that if
followed religiously would issue, in the long run, in my no longer
accepting belief in God.) But secondly, there seems no reason to think
that I have such an obligation. Clearly I am not under an obligation
to have evidence for everything I believe; that would not be possible.
But why, then, suppose that I have an obligation to accept belief in
God only if I accept other propositions which serve as evidence for
it? This is by no means self-evident or just obvious, and it is
extremely hard to see how to find a cogent argument for it.

In any event, I think the evidentialist objector can take a more
promising line. He can hold, not that the theist without evidence has
violated some epistemic duty-after all, perhaps he can't help himself-
but that he is somehow intellectually flawed or disfigured. Consider
someone who believes that Venus is smaller than Mercury-not because he
has evidence, but because he read it in a comic book and always
believes whatever he reads in comic books-or consider someone who
holds that belief on the basis of an outrageously bad argument.
Perhaps there is no obligation he has failed to meet; nevertheless his
intellectual condition is defective in some way. He displays a sort of
deficiency, a flaw, an intellectual dysfunction of some sort. Perhaps
he is like someone who has an astigmatism, or is unduly clumsy, or
suffers from arthritis. And perhaps the evidentialist objection is to
be construed, not as the claim that the theist without evidence has
violated some intellectual obligations, but that he suffers from a
certain sort of intellectual deficiency. The theist without evidence,
we might say, is an intellectual gimp.

Alternatively but similarly, the idea might be that the theist without
evidence is under a sort of illusion, a kind of pervasive illusion
afflicting the great bulk of mankind over the great bulk of the time
thus far allotted to it. Thus Freud saw religious belief as
"illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most insistent
wishes of mankind."[4 ]He sees theistic belief as a matter of
wish-fulfillment. Men are paralyzed by and appalled at the spectacle
of the overwhelming, impersonal forces that control our destiny, but
mindlessly take no notice, no account of us and our needs and desires;
they therefore invent a heavenly father of cosmic proportions, who
exceeds our earthly fathers in goodness and love as much as in power.
Religion, says Freud, is the "universal obsessional neurosis of
humanity", and it is destined to disappear when human beings learn to
face reality as it is, resisting the tendency to edit it to suit our
fancies.

A similar sentiment is offered by Karl Marx:


Religion . . . is the self-consciousness and the self-feeling of the
man who has either not yet fo nd himself, or else (having found
himself) has lost himself once more. But man is not an abstract being
. . . Man is the world of men, the State, society. This State, this
society, produce religion, produce a perverted world consciousness,
because they are a perverted world . . . Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is
the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The people cannot be really happy until it has been deprived of
illusory happiness by the abolition of religion. The demand that the
people should shake itself free of illusion as to its own condition is
the demand that it should abandon a condition which needs illusion.[5]
Note that Marx speaks here of a perverted world consciousness produced
by a perverted world. This is a perversion from a correct, or right,
or natural condition, brought about somehow by an unhealthy and
perverted social order. From the Marx-Freud point of view, the theist
is subject to a sort of cognitive dysfunction, a certain lack of
cognitive and emotional health. We could put this as follows: the
theist believes as he does only because of the power of this illusion,
this perverted neurotic condition. He is insane, in the etymological
sense of that term; he is unhealthy. His cognitive equipment, we might
say, isn't working properly; it isn't functioning as it ought to. If
his cognitive equipment were working properly, working the way it
ought to work, he wouldn't be under the spell of this illusion. He
would instead face the world and our place in it with the clear-eyed
apprehension that we are alone in it, and that any comfort and help we
get will have to be our own devising. There is no Father in heaven to
turn to, and no prospect of anything, after death, but dissolution.
("When we die, we rot," says Michael Scriven, in one of his more
memorable lines.)
Now of course the theist is likely to display less than overwhelming
enthusiasm about the idea that he is suffering from a cognitive
deficiency, is under a sort of widespread illusion endemic to the
human condition. It is at most a liberal theologian or two, intent on
novelty and eager to concede as much as possible to contemporary
secularity, who would embrace such an idea. The theist doesn't see
himself as suffering from cognitive deficiency. As a matter of fact,
he may be inclined to see the shoe as on the other foot; he may be
inclined to think of the atheist as the person who is suffering, in
this way, from some illusion, from some noetic defect, from an
unhappy, unfortunate, and unnatural condition with deplorable noetic
consequences. He will see the atheist as somehow the victim of sin in
the world- his own sin or the sin of others. According to the book of
Romans, unbelief is a result of sin; it originates in an effort to
"suppress the truth in unrighteousness." According to John Calvin, God
has created us with a nisus or tendency to see His hand in the world
around us; a "sense of deity," he says, "is inscribed in the hearts of
all." He goes on:


Indeed, the perversity of the impious, who though they struggle
furiously are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of God, is
abundant testimony that his conviction, namely, that there is some
God, is naturally inborn in all, and is fixed deep within, as it were
in the very marrow. . . . From this we conclude that it is not a
doctrine that must first be learned in school, but one of which each
of us is master from his mother's womb and which nature itself permits
no man to forget.[6]
Were it not for the existence of sin in the world, says Calvin, human
beings would believe in God to the same degree and with the same
natural spontaneity displayed in our belief in the existence of other
persons, or an external world, or the past. This is the natural human
condition; it is because of our presently unnatural sinful condition
that many of us find belief in God difficult or absurd. The fact is,
Calvin thinks, one who does not believe in God is in an epistemically
defective position-rather like someone who does not believe that his
wife exists, or thinks that she is a cleverly constructed robot that
has no thoughts, feelings, or consciousness. Thus the believer
reverses Freud and Marx, claiming that what they see as sickness is
really health and what they see as health is really sickness.
Obviously enough, the dispute here is ultimately ontological, or
theological, or metaphysical; here we see the ontological and
ultimately religious roots of epistemological discussions of
rationality. What you take to be rational, at least in the sense in
question, depends upon your metaphysical and religious stance. It
depends upon your philosophical anthropology. Your view as to what
sort of creature a human being is will determine, in whole or in part,
your views as to what is rational or irrational for human beings to
believe; this view will determine what you take to be natural, or
normal, or healthy, with respect to belief. So the dispute as to who
is rational and who is irrational here can't be settled just by
attending to epistemological considerations; it is fundamentally not
an epistemological dispute, but an ontological or theological dispute.
How can we tell what it is healthy for human beings to believe unless
we know or have some idea about what sort of creature a human being
is? If you think he is created by God in the image of God, and created
with a natural tendency to see God's hand in the world about us, a
natural tendency to recognize that he has been created and is beholden
to his creator, owing his worship and allegiance, then of course you
will not think of belief in God as a manifestation of wishful thinking
or as any kind of defect at all. It is then much more like sense
perception or memory, though in some ways much more important. On the
other hand, if you think of a human being as the product of blind
evolutionary forces, if you think there is no God and that human
beings are part of a godless universe, then you will be inclined to
accept a view according to which belief in God is a sort of disease or
dysfunction, due perhaps, to a sort of softening of the brain.

So the dispute as to who is healthy and who diseased has ontological
or theological roots, and is finally to be settled, if at all at that
level. And here I would like to present a consideration that, I think
tells in favor of the theistic way of looking at the matter. As I have
been representing that matter, theist and atheist alike speak of a
sort of dysfunction, of cognitive faculties or cognitive equipment not
working properly, of their not working as they ought to. But how are
we to understand that? What is it for something to work properly?
Isn't there something deeply problematic about the idea of proper
functioning? What is it for my cognitive faculties to be working
properly? What is it for a natural organism-a tree, for example-to be
in good working order, to be functioning properly? Isn't working
properly relative to our aims and interests? A cow is functioning
properly when she gives milk; a garden patch is as it ought to be when
it displays a luxuriant preponderance of the sorts of vegetation we
propose to promote. But then it seems patent that what constitutes
proper functioning depends upon our aims and interests. So far as
nature herself goes, isn't a fish decomposing in a hill of corn
functioning just as properly, just as excellently, as one happily
swimming about chasing minnows? But then what could be meant by
speaking of "proper functioning" with respect to our cognitive
faculties? A chunk of reality-an organism, a part of an organism, an
ecosystem, a garden patch-"functions properly" only with respect to a
sort of grid we impose on nature-a grid that incorporates our aims and
desires.

But from a theistic point of view, the idea of proper functioning, as
applied to us and our cognitive equipment, is not more problematic
than, say, that of a Boeing 747's working properly. Something we have
constructed-a heating system, a rope, a linear accelerator-is
functioning properly when it is functioning in the way it was designed
to function. My car works properly if it works the way it was designed
to work. My refrigerator is working properly if it refrigerates, if it
does what a refrigerator is designed to do. This, I think, is the root
idea of working properly. But according to theism, human beings, like
ropes and linear accelerators, have been designed; they have been
created and designed by God. Thus, he has an easy answer to the
relevant set of questions: What is proper functioning? What is it for
my cognitive faculties to be working properly? What is cognitive
dysfunction? What is it to function naturally? My cognitive faculties
are functioning naturally, when they are functioning in the way God
designed them to function.

On the other hand, if the atheological evidentialist objector claims
that the theist without evidence is irrational, and if he goes on to
construe irrationality in terms of defect or dysfunction, then he owes
us an account of this notion. Why does he take it that the theist is
somehow dysfunctional, at least in this area of his life? More
importantly, how does he conceive dysfunction? How does he see
dysfunction and its opposite? How does he explain the idea of an
organism's working properly, or of some organic system or part of an
organism's thus working? What account does he give of it? Presumably
he can't see the proper functioning of my noetic equipment as its
functioning in the way it was designed to function; so how can he put
it?

Two possibilities leap to mind. First, he may be thinking of proper
functioning as functioning in a way that helps us attain our ends. In
this way, he may say, we think of our bodies as functioning properly,
as being healthy, when they function in the way we want them to, when
they function in such a way as to enable us to do the sorts of things
we want to do. But of course this will not be a promising line to take
in the present context; for while perhaps the atheological objector
would prefer to see our cognitive faculties function in such a way as
not to produce belief in God in us, the same cannot be said, naturally
enough, for the theist. Taken this way the atheological
evidentialist's objection comes to little more than the suggestion
that the atheologician would prefer it if people did not believe in
God without evidence. That would be an autobiographical remark on his
part, having the interest such remarks usually have in philosophical
contexts.

A second possibility: proper functioning and allied notions are to be
explained in terms of aptness for promoting survival, either at an
individual or species level. There isn't time to say much about this
here; but it is at least and immediately evident that the atheological
objector would then owe us an argument for the conclusion that belief
in God is indeed less likely to contribute to our individual survival,
or the survival of our species than is atheism or agnosticism. But how
could such an argument go? Surely the prospects for a non-question
begging argument of this sort are bleak indeed. For if
theism-Christian theism, for example-is true, then it seems wholly
implausible to think that widespread atheism, for example, would be
more likely to contribute to the survival of our race than widespread
theism.

By way of conclusion: a natural way to understand such notions as
rationality and irrationality is in terms of the proper functioning of
the relevant cognitive equipment. Seen from this perspective, the
question whether it is rational to believe in God without the
evidential support of other propositions is really a metaphysical or
theological dispute. The theist has an easy time explaining the notion
of our cognitive equipment's functioning properly: our cognitive
equipment functions properly when it functions in the way God designed
it to function. The atheist evidential objector, however, owes us an
account of this notion. What does he mean when he complains that the
theist without evidence displays a cognitive defect of some sort? How
does he understand the notion of cognitive malfunction?

NOTES
[1]W.K. Clifford, "The Ethics of Belief," in Lectures and Essays
(London: Macmillan, 1879), p. 183.
[2]Ibid, p. 184.

[3]Ibid, p. 186.

[4]Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1961),
p. 30.

[5]K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3: Introduction to a
Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, by Karl Marx (London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1975).

[6]John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford
Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1.3 (p. 43-
44).

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