Should religious people be banned from serving on juries?

[Kingpoleon]

Yes, atheists are literally barred from public office in eight states, but clearly the real issue that demands our attention is a Reddit thread that BRTD found about how theists should be barred from jury duty.

I know I've said this before, but it is truly a testament to the intellectual frailty of the theistic worldview that-- after centuries of great thinkers have poured their hearts and minds into constructing rigid logical arguments to support their culture's collective fantasies-- the best counter to secular philosophy that they've been able to muster is "haha neckbeard fedora Redditor." This stereotype may have briefly helped Christians paint atheists as "uncool" during the period when teenage BRTD was discovering the internet, but today it is beyond irrelevant and religiosity among young people is still plummeting like a brick. The only people who these """arguments""" will appeal to are those who are so incurious that they will literally convert to Christianity to "own the atheists," like the person mentioned in the OP. This doesn't sound like the kind of genuine conviction that will help Christianity survive into future generations, to say the least.

Yes, how will Christendom survive attacks from great minds like Jerry Coyne, Ricky Gervais, Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, P. Z. Myers, and John Dule?

My chief objection to this sort of radical fideistic form of atheism is not atheists as such. I’m sure many atheists are perfectly fine people. It is rather the sort of claim which compares Aquinas’s arguments for God to a five year old’s belief in Santa, mistaking the rather new “theology” of fideism for all of Christianity; which declares philosophy dead; and which states that since science has not proven God or the afterlife via experiment, it somehow disproves them (thus taking up a rather radical philosophy of empiricism).

[Kingpoleon]

To be fair to Dule, none of this, philosophically speaking, is obvious nonsense or anything. It's just that lately it's been advanced mostly by television personalities and "science popularizers" who hate philosophy and thus have no idea what they're talking about, because we live in a decadent and exhausted age in which (for example) someone like William Lane Craig can seem like a theological heavyweight. Go back to the days of Hume or even Russell and this exact same series of debates was much more robustly and seriously conducted on all sides.

I find it frankly difficult to even root for WLC against atheists. The kalam argument is probably the second worst argument for God’s existence, after the infamous version of the ontological argument, and it comes at the high cost of denying classical theism’s understanding of creation.

It is true that, as David Bentley Hart says, God’s existence has become incredible to many is not due to what we moderns have learned but what we have forgotten. Christianity alone among all the major religions gave birth to modern secularism. The result of it is that although the West now abounds in proximate value, it has done so at the cost of those things of ultimate value.

[Kingpoleon]

The kalam (or "prime mover") argument is a complete failure.

The argument is predicated on the premise that everything that exists had a cause that brought it into being. Even this premise is now being questioned by modern physicists, but ignoring that, the argument then proceeds to establish that-- if everything had a cause-- then the universe itself must have had a cause, and that cause (or "prime mover") is what we call "God."

This argument fails utterly because the conception of the Judeo-Christian God is an "uncaused" being-- "In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth." The aforementioned William Lane Craig literally argues that "If the universe had a cause, then an uncaused creator of the universe exists." But his argument for a being that is uncaused is now directly predicated on the premise that everything has a cause. Surely if one can argue that God is uncaused, then one could also argue that the universe itself is uncaused (thus cutting out the middleman). And of course, if one actually follows the argument through, its conclusion (the existence of an uncaused being) nullifies its very premise (that everything must have a cause).

This sequence of logic is so self-contradictory that it is hard to believe any thinking person could take it seriously after even the most cursory examination. Nonetheless, it's still probably the best argument theists have ever come up with.

Er, no. The kalam cosmological argument is predicated not on the claim that everything has a cause, but rather that everything which begins to exist has a cause. The idea that beings on the same ontological premise have causes is nothing more than the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which, as defended by Kurt Gödel and Alexander Pruss, is almost certainly the strongest argument for God’s existence. The PSR, may, of course, be false - the stab wounds in the body may have appeared out of no cause at all, but it is doubtful that the police or any reasonable person would be convinced of such a claim.

I'm somewhat bewildered by this statement actually. I get that the kalam argument has its shortcomings, but I would say it is probably the second best argument for God's existence after the classical cosmological arguments (I am grouping them together though you can distinguish between valid versions). Yes it has trouble showing the universe had a temporal beginning and that such concludes with the Christian God and not deism, but still to go even there is a pretty big deal. Compared with the bulk of modern arguments like the moral argument, fine tuning, etc etc, Kalam is quite good.

The Kalam argument is bad in particular because it is not strictly a rationalistic argument. The second premise, that the Universe had a beginning, is not a rational question but an empirical one, and as such the argument unduly mixes science and philosophy. WLC has not even begun to take on the cosmologists who hold to an infinite universe.

[Kingpoleon]

Then it fails because it presumes without justification that the universe must have had a beginning but god did not. In either case, it is a sloppy mess.

Er, no. It presumes that an eternal being is a sufficient explanation for a being in time; if God has a beginning, then he would require a regress to infinity - that is, an eternal entity which itself would be God. As for the claim that Lawrence Krauss “disproved” the kalam argument, he insists that a quantum field and the laws of the universe are nothing. Being something of an existing person and so an expert on the subject of existence, allow me to assure you that nothing is best defined as no thing.

I recommend Don Page’s Amazon review of the book A Universe From Nothing in case you don’t understand what nothing is and why Krauss is wrong about what nothing is.

Krauss, if his highly speculative theory is correct, may have shown that from a physical entity, a quantum field, matter can blink in and out of being. Unfortunately, his insistence that nothing merely means the absence of matter is incorrect.

[Kingpoleon]

You're not even attempting to communicate at this point, are you?

Wait, do you really not understand why a finite universe would regress to an infinite being?

[Kingpoleon]

Please enlighten me.

Insofar as a finite thing is, it regresses to infinity because a temporally infinite being alone can begin a finite being. If a finite being begins a finite being, then the foremost of these regresses to an infinite being.

This is a poor argument in large part due to 1) its deistic element; 2) its dependence upon an empirical fact which might change, IE that it appears as though the universe had a beginning; and 3) it is superseded by First Cause arguments which do not depend upon a temporal beginning for the universe.

[Kingpoleon]

Why?

*Eventually*. Obviously a finite entity such as a robot can build a finite entity, but even if a finite entity did create our universe, the kalam argument is correct that how ever many entities there are would themselves be contingent upon an infinite entity.

Of course, it is possible that things need not causes; that a body with stab wounds just appeared and neither existed prior nor was it actually stabbed. Such an idea itself is, of course, contrary to any rational attempt at viewing reality and thus cannot reasonably be known even if true. This is also true of the idea that the universe was created five minutes ago with the appearance of age.

[Kingpoleon]

You've replaced the word "being" with the word "entity." Perhaps an "entity" (such as "matter" or "energy" itself) exists that is truly infinite, but there is no requirement that-- if such an infinite thing exists-- it must be a conscious being.

No one seriously has a view of God as some super human in the sky.

Nevertheless, a being (defined as something which exists) which brings the universe into existence would have agency.

[Kingpoleon]

A falling stone has agency, in that it performs an action and that action can have effects. That doesn't mean the stone is conscious, or that it understands or intends any of the consequences of its action (qualities that Christians ascribe to Yahweh). So no, your logic doesn't follow. And even if the proposition is a general statement such as "The finite must come from something infinite" (eschewing theistic arguments), that is still an unfalsifiable claim and therefore pointless to discuss.

Firstly, German theology, as well as Thomism and the Eastern tradition, are all VERY suspicious of ascribing qualities to God except by analogy.

Secondly, the idea that because rationalistic and deductive arguments cannot be tested and are therefore worthless is somewhat undermined by your prior engagements with deductive arguments. (Of course, the claim that all truths must be determinable by experiment is itself a rationalistic claim which certainly undermines itself as it cannot be tested or falsified.)

[Kingpoleon]

How does this excuse your comically poor logic? You started this digression with a condescending remark about how it's obvious that a finite universe must come from an infinite being. It is ridiculous for one to presume that this is the sole possibility for our universe's origins. As usual, your "proofs" make it only so far to suggest a general claim about the nature of reality-- in this case, that there must be something that exists which is eternal-- while providing zero evidence for why that thing must be the Christian god. So even if your premises logically followed (which they don't), you'd still be dozens of steps away from intellectually justifying your religious beliefs.

Anyway, the problem with your argument is not the fact that it is deductive. Its problem is that the deductions don't make any sense. You leap from the claim that there "must be something eternal" (a dubious premise) to imbuing that thing with the qualities of the Christian god without merit. Then when asked how this logically follows, you give some cryptic answer about how we shouldn't ascribe any qualities to god. Perhaps this is just a cheap way for you to wave away god's nature as "beyond our comprehension." The claim that the "eternal thing" which began our universe is god does not follow from your premises, and your response regarding the nature of god is again unfalsifiable.

And as for Disco, I don't know what's more irritating: The people who actually believe this stuff, or the people who think that fundamental disagreements on the nature of reality aren't worth discussing.

Hang on, how many qualities does “the Christian God” have, as distinct from “God”? If you mean that you are calling on me to here and now expound my belief in the Resurrection in a few hundred page essay, I am quite prepared to do so.

However, thus far I have been arguing for an argument I do not believe in to explain why your particular objections to it are mistaken.

[Kingpoleon]

And I'm explaining to you that, even if you present the argument in the way you're describing it, the logic still doesn't follow. There is no reason why a finite universe should be assumed to have originated from an "eternal being," which was your initial claim. Therefore my objection to it still holds water and your counter to it fails.

You still haven’t produced the deductive counter which deals the death blow to the kalam; chiefly, the possibility of an infinite regress of contingent causes.

However, if we grant the deductive conclusion of the kalam, its advocates generally delineate fairly good reasons to reach theistic personalism, and indeed, few if any professional philosophers believe that these arguments fail if we grant the premises of the kalam. This is most notable in Craig’s debate with Peter Atkins and William F. Buckley, the former of whom suggested that the universe was created by a timeless, all powerful, all knowing, all good, immaterial, and personal computer that had us in mind; that is, Atkins grants all the qualia of God barring his name alone and calls himself an atheist.

[Kingpoleon]

I was going to mention this. Excluding the possibility of an infinite regress is unsupportable. Likewise the assumption of the principle of sufficient reason, when it's also imaginable that things can come into existence without a cause.

Cosmological arguments assume a classically rational universe that doesn’t seem to be justified.

I think the rejection of the PSR, namely uncaused things that are contingent or finite, leads one to wild possibilities, not the least of which is accepting the reality of miracles.

(It is, of course, possible that the dead body in the trunk of your car just is there without a cause, but nobody is likely to take such a claim seriously.)

Indeed, by giving a reason for limiting the PSR, one ironically falls into an infinite regress because a limited PSR cannot possibly support itself, whereas an unlimited PSR necessarily does.

Edit: I do think First Cause arguments not based on a universal beginning are also fairly sound.