February 29, 2012
Well, I’m sick of waiting for consensus so I’m moving forward, with or without everybody or anybody. As far as an explanation of the hold up, here’s my take.
February 22, 2012
This is just a brief announcement. I’ll explain in detail later.
February 20, 2012
I’ve concluded that needless suffering exists. On my view, sin caused death, suffering and so-called “natural evil.” According to Genesis, God made the world good and humans had eternal life. Sin entailed a fall from the highest possible good. It was not necessary, God did not desire it. The suffering sin produced cannot possibly be logically required for the higher good to obtain because the highest possible good had already obtained. Criticisms that God “could have made a world without suffering” are nullified.
Even though suffering is needless, eliminating suffering doesn’t eliminate any higher good. Suffering isn’t necessary to produce goods. Obviously, Jesus didn’t believe that removing suffering eliminated higher good, else no sick would have been healed, nor would commands to heal be issued. In fact, we would have been commanded to ignore suffering. This defangs Peter’s “obstruction of divine justice” argument on the spot.
This might complicate judging, but that’s where the logic lead. I’ll counter as many of Peter’s arguments as I can, and see where the second round takes us.
February 14, 2012
Hello. I am Peter Hurford, I am the author of Greatplay.net and I am an atheist. I am here because I am involved in a debate with Cl, the author of The Warfare is Mental and somewhat of a Christian theist. While I think there are many reasons to not believe in various gods and many additional reasons to not believe in specifically benevolent gods, we are here to talk about only one part of one issue: the existence of needless suffering.
This is the index for DBT01 between Peter Hurford and I.
Round One
- Adamoriens’ Commentary on cl
- Round One: Daniel Vecchio on cl
- Adamoriens’ Commentary on Peter
- Round One: Matt DeStefano on Peter
- Round One: Andrés Ruiz on Peter
- Round One: Daniel Vecchio on Peter
- Round One: cl
- Round One: Peter Hurford
- Call For Judges, Scoring Suggestions
- Announcement
February 12, 2012
This post is a request for Vox Day (or anybody) to explain how one can reliably discern the condition of another Christian’s heart. I can’t, and when I asked Vox how he can, Spacebunny returned to her customary pattern of deleting my comments for no good reason. Here’s the story: Vox wrote a post titled Another Pattern Observed in which he not-so-temperately attacked Christian leader John Piper as “an intemperate attacker of other Christian leaders,” accusing Piper of an “insincere apology” over his use of the phrase “kicks some ass” at a particular evangelical convention. I and other commenters felt Vox may have been too quick to grab the tar and feathers, so I asked Vox how he could possibly know that Piper’s apology was insincere. I mean I get that he’s a “superintelligence” and all, but can Vox Day really know the condition of Piper’s heart?
February 10, 2012
This post is an open discussion for the confirmed judges (Daniel Vecchio, Matt DeStefano and Andrés Ruiz) in next week’s debate between Peter Hurford and I. We also have a tentative fourth judge (Adamoriens), who I will be happy to implement should we be able to locate a willing fifth judge (to preserve an odd number of judges, with Peter’s consent of course). Feel free to volunteer yourself or suggest somebody else, but keep in mind the fifth judge must be a theist (since Adamoriens would effectively qualify as an atheist in this debate). I’ve got a few people in mind, we’ll see what happens. Regardless of whether we end up with three judges or five, this debate is scheduled to kickoff Wednesday February 15th, so we should all talk about scoring. Ultimately, it is up to the judges, but I want the thread open so we can get as much feedback as possible.
We talked a little about scoring debates a few posts back, everybody might want to read that first.
Happy belated New Year! I don’t know about you, but I sure had a nice rest. Once I noticed that people were finding the new TWIM (presumably through Google searches), I had to step into high gear and get back in action. My apologies if the blog has seemed “dead” for a while. I assure you I’m now fully up and running and will now be responding to comments and posting in my usual manner.
If you were a regular at the old TWIM, you might have noticed that I’ve given it yet another facelift. Although, this time it’s actually more than a facelift. We went from a WordPress-hosted, generic, rigid, ugly, hardly-customizable theme to a self-hosted hand-crafted theme! The “stock” WordPress blog definitely had it’s pluses and minuses, but in the final analysis there weren’t any existing themes that had the look or features I wanted. So I wrote my own. That’s the cool thing about WordPress: a basic coding / graphic design skill set allows you one to do almost anything. It’s definitely a little Beta, but at least now I can do pretty much whatever I want with this blog (technically speaking). Please have a look around and let me know if you come across anything that looks or works funky. Are any areas hard to read? Any broken links? Any weird paragraph formatting? Page(s) not displaying correctly in some browser or device? Leave a comment describing whatever it is, and also your system, device and/or browser if you don’t mind. So far the theme seems to work well in the major browsers and on iPhones.
So what else is new?
February 4, 2012
Our first debate of the year is officially scheduled as follows:
- Opening Statement by Peter Hurford (2000 words), due February 15th.
- My rebuttal (1500 words), due February 19th.
- Peter’s rejoinder (1500 words), due February 23rd.
- My second rebuttal (1500 words), due February 27th.
- Peter’s closing statement (1000 words), due March 2nd.
- My closing statement (500 words), due March 8th.
As explained on the debates page, Peter will argue that needless suffering exists, ergo belief in the traditional Abrahamic God is not justified (NOTE: in our email chain, Peter and I agreed—for whatever reason at that time—that we would not be debating the “ergo” part). The judges for this debate are Daniel Vecchio (Theist), Andrés Ruiz (Agnostic), and Matt DeStefano (Atheist).
This post is just a placeholder to continue this discussion from the now-defunct Common Sense Atheism blog, should any of the participants or onlookers be interested.
