Pardon the alliteration.

SSU is excellent in every way, and is becoming more excellent every week, but just in case it doesn’t satisfy all your skeptical and secularist needs, or if, like me, you are looking with both anticipation and trepidation toward graduation, there is, in fact, a proverbial reality-based community outside of UW. Here are some links to get you started. (As an aside, while we college students nowadays organize via Facebook, those not in college tend to favor Meetup.com, so several of these are Meetup groups rather than actual organizations.)

Seattle Atheists is an actual (incorporated) non-profit in Seattle dedicated to defending the rights and interests of atheists and agnostics in Seattle and to performing secularly motivated community service. It also organizes charitable and educational events.

Seattle Atheists/Agnostics Meetup Group meets regularly on the third Thursday of every month  (e.g. tonight) to eat, drink, be merry, and talk about whatever it is atheists, agnostics, and people of other creeds who hang out with atheists and agnostics talk about. The group also has irregular events, like an upcoming Halloween party. There is a suggested donation of $0.50 to help pay for the Meetup.com group.
Drinking Skeptically meets on the third Tuesday of every month at a restaurant to either hear a presentation on a skepticism-related topic or hear skeptics’ usual targets (”prey”?) make their case. The presentation is followed by a discussion and/or a debate. Past presenters include Discovery Institute, SkepDoc, and 9/11 Truthers. The upcoming meeting (a “Halloween special”, if you will) will have paranormal investigators. There is no suggested donation (that I’ve noticed), but it is recommended that you get something to eat and/or drink at the hosting restaurant. The linked Meetup group also lists other events of interest to self-identified skeptics.
Seattle Society for Sensible Explanations is an older group, gathering approximately once per month for a presentation by a speaker from the skeptic and/or secularist community. Past speakers have included Michael Shermer, PZ Myers, and Ray Hyman. Most of the meetings take place at a restaurant, and require an RSVP and the purchase of a dinner, usually around $30, also covering the venue and the speaker’s honorarium. Of particular interest to those interested in secularism is the upcoming speaker, Josh Rosenau from NCSE.

There are others, such as Seattle Humanists, and several on the East side of Lake Washington or farther North (e.g. Lynnwod), but I haven’t had a chance to go see what they are about. If you’ve been to any of those, post a reply with your impressions, and I’ll add them to this entry.

Disclaimer: This entry contains the views of an SSU member, and does not necessarily represent the views of the Secular Student Union.

This is a quick sketch of my responses, reading Jay’s refutation. Please, feel free to point out flaws in anything I say. If I’m snarky, Jay started it

Jay makes many serious philosophical claims without much justification. In my opinion, his only worthwhile point is that this story didn’t actually happen.

“If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil.”

So the professor’s argument could be said to run like this:
1. God created everything.
2. Evil exists.
3. Character traits of a creation are present in a creator (or at least, if said creator was the only thing in existence at the time of creation, perhaps).
Therefore,
4. God is evil.
And, because I’m feeling snarky:
5. Christians say God isn’t evil.
Therefore,
6. All of Christian faith is a myth.
This is somewhat a strange formulation of the argument from evil, mainly because it is so easy to blow premise 3 out of the water (I have so many more problems I won’t bother, just use a decent formulation). There are numerous solutions to it more clever than the student’s. Read Plantinga, for example (if I may quote Wikipedia, “since the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s free will defence, the majority, though not unanimous, view among contemporary scholars is that logical arguments from evil are not successful.” Or read J.L. Mackie for a decent formulation of the argument from evil.

“A is the lack of B
C is the lack of D
Thus, E is the lack of F”

Arguments from analogy are a valid form of argument. They can never prove the conclusion, however, only make it more likely, and always are a little sketchy.

Oh, and darkness, it actually happens to be an absence of light. You can be very much in the dark surrounded by radio waves. While scientifically, complete darkness is impossible, and so darkness isn’t the complete absence of light, it is still the relative absence of light. In fact, I believe most theists would argue that, just so, it is impossible to have a complete absence of God. This was, in fact, a perfect metaphor for this student to choose for his argument

Furthermore, while temperature is related to average kinetic energy, Jay isn’t quite correct here. Degrees of freedom are also relevant.

Furthermore, while Jay is quite right that this student’s use of analogy may be partly flawed, you can’t simply dismiss the student’s definition of evil. It is quite Platonic, actually, that evil is only privatio boni. While this student’s answer is perhaps not sufficient to refute decent formulations of the argument from evil, it a valid argument against the 3rd premise of this professor’s “argument,” or at least could easily be made such if expanded slightly, following the natural course of the student’s reasoning.

“Good and evil imply action. A human, doing nothing, cannot logically be good or evil.”
This is highly debatable. However, I believe most philosophers would agree that there are situations in which inaction is unethical. Although Jay fails to define what counts as “action,” and it is unclear if a human can ever be “doing nothing.”

“Why aren’t all atheists pure evil?”
Throughout this argument Jay seems to feel that Christians appeal to a divine command theory of morality, something not present in the anecdote.

“Morality is subjective, not absolute. Thus, it has little to do with science. Even in religion, morality changes.”
Again, this is an incredibly, incredibly complex argument within philosophy which this refutation seem to entirely discard in a sweeping statement. While I believe most philosophers would agree that morality can change (one common example is that if alien overlords enslaved us and made it so that, upon a person feeling compassion, the subject of their compassion would be obliterated, then compassion would cease to be a virtue), I have yet to see a valid argument for the cultural relativism of ethics.

“According to this story, once I trip the old lady, I am then lacking God. It’s like God suddenly leaves? This is ridiculous.”
I’m not going to give this an in-depth analysis, however, I’ll just say that Jay and the author have very different concepts of God, and as neither of them have defined them, this is hardly a meaningful “attack” to make.

On the bright side, the philosophy in this rebuttal isn’t as bad as that of Dawkins. It has always appalled me how the atheists in the spot light have no grasp on philosophy, and always revert to simple (long since shown to be invalid) rebuttals for simple, ancient (often the oldest formulation that can be found) arguments. Probably because it is impossible to find real philosophy on the internet or in a public library.

Disclaimer: The following contains my (Jay’s) own opinions and does not necessarily represent the views of the SSU.

Two of my friends on Myspace posted this story on their blogs. With a simple google search, I am seeing this story all over the Internet, with thousands of vulnerable web surfers exclaiming, “Great job!” and “This is amazing.”

The only thing that is amazing about this story is how stupid it is. 

Please correct me if I make any mistakes or logical fallacies.

I am using a New International Version of the Bible.

“The university professor challenged his students with this question. Did God create everything that exists?

A student bravely replied yes, he did!”

“God created everything?” The professor asked.

“Yes, sir,” the student replied.

The professor answered, “If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil.”

(more…)

I wrote this post on the SSU site, criticizing a sermon given by Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church called “Spiritual Warfare, pt 2.” A little while after that, Mars Hill Deacon Matt Jensen contacted me, and we met up for coffee.

Matt asked me to do an interview series dubbed “Conversations With a Skeptic,” hosted at Mars Hill Church a short time later. I think we were both quite satisfied with the result.

We’re not sure how many are going to be in the series, but I’ll make sure to announce them here. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

This is also being covered on Mars Hill’s blog, over here.

Conversations With A Skeptic 1 from Mars Hill College Mission on Vimeo.

The SSU RRS has begun! If you are ever irritated by the kooks in Red Square telling you about your future fiery fate, then join the SSU Rational Response Squad to counter-protest with the message of peace from his noodlyness, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Upon seeing such signs in Red Square, RRS members send me a text, which I then forward to the rest of the squad. We rush to the noodle-cave, obtain the sacred pirate garments, flags, and signs, and combat the silliness with even sillierness. Join the Facebook Group if you are interested!
http://www.new.facebook.com/group.php?gid=28037354819

Disclaimer: This entry contains the views of an SSU member, and does not necessarily represent the views of the Secular Student Union.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the movie Religulous since I saw it last night and I wanted to post my thoughts on it in case anyone comes out of it confused. Religulous is not designed to be a religious conversion movie. If you expect to drag your Christian friends to a showing and have the scales fall from their eyes, you will be sorely disappointed. Make no mistake about it, Religulous was not designed to make Christians uncomfortable, it was designed to make Atheists uncomfortable.

Round and round the Atheist blogs, the message is the same. Maher is smug, smarmy and wholly incompentent. He doesn’t have a competent grasp of the key arguments of atheism, he isn’t a particularly good debater. In fact, his arguments are riddled with fallacies and flaws. In short,he’s not good enough to be an atheist.

But the simple question the movie asks is why do we need brilliant, educated, calm, charming people to spearhead atheism? Why do we set the bar so high? Why do we seek out ever increasingly sophisticated arguments and argue with so much patience and cede so much respect to the religious? Why can’t it be just some schmuck going “A talking snake? Really?”

Because when Atheists stop ceding religious beliefs the respect they give to no other form of belief, that’s what it boils down to. What the movie was trying to say was that it’s you who are the problem. You, the ones that say such an ignorant smarmy bastard isn’t allowed to be the face of atheism. That the atheist agenda has to be run like a high priesthood managed by a slick PR team.

Maher showed the world what the other face of atheism could be. To stop arguing religion on their terms and to start arguing it on ours. To stop battling their strongest arguments as if that had any hope of converting them but to resort to simple ridicule because such beliefs are not even worth thinking of a smart argument against. When the other side is bringing to the table big fishes and bushes and talking snakes, do you really need to bone up on the intricacies of carbon dating in order to defeat them?

Personally, I disliked the movie. I thought the Michael Moore style editing was odious and Maher, like most non-religious people, seriously underestimates the profound impact of a genuine religious experience. But that doesn’t stop me from appreciating what they were trying to do. Religulous was designed to be uncomfortable to atheists because it’s completely non-threatening to religious people.

Hello folks! Sorry for the last minute notice, but we will indeed be meeting tomorrow.

We’ll be in the same room, 200C of the HUB at 5:00PM, to discuss the common perception of atheists by Christians.

We will be cutting the meeting somewhat short to go see Religulous at the Neptune Theater (on 45th & Brooklyn) at about 630!

Hope to see you all there!