RE: Is God a logical contradiction?
August 4, 2019 at 2:01 am
(This post was last modified: August 4, 2019 at 2:30 am by Belacqua.)
(August 4, 2019 at 1:24 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:Quote:The God Delusion, an energetic attack on all religious belief, has just been released by Richard Dawkins, the zoologist and tireless tractarian, who—despite his embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning—never fails to entrance his eager readers with his rhetorical recklessness.
Awww, this schmuck steeps down to ad hominem attacks. If the book is so "bad" then he could have easily debunk it and not go on ad hominem tirade.
Quote:The journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose talent for intellectual caricature somewhat exceeds his mastery of consecutive logic, has just issued God Is Not Great,
What? Even more ad hominem attacks?!!
He makes no ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem is a logical fallacy when you declare that a person's argument must be incorrect because of something about the person himself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
For example, if you say "this man is bald, so what he says about shampoo must be incorrect." Hart never does this kind of thing. I don't know where you got these quotes, but he and many others have made detailed records of all the errors and faulty arguments in the books of Dawkins, Hitchens, and others. They don't have to make arguments based on logical fallacies because they can explain the errors.
For example, here is some of what he wrote about Hitchens' book:
Quote:He actually believes that Nietzsche, in announcing the death of God,
literally meant to suggest that the supreme being named God had somehow met
his demise. The title of one of his chapters is “The Metaphysical Claims of
Religion are False,” but nowhere in that chapter does he actually say what those
claims or their flaws are. Moreover, on matters of simple historical and textual
fact, Hitchens’s book is so extraordinarily crowded with errors, great and small,
that it is obvious that, while writing it, he could not even be troubled with so
much as a quick visit to the nearest encyclopaedia. Just to skim a few off the
surface, somewhat haphazardly: He speaks of the ethos of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
as “an admirable but nebulous humanism” (which is roughly on a par with
saying that Gandhi was an apostle of the ruthless conquest and spoliation of
weaker peoples). He conflates the events of the first and fourth crusades (but
what’s a century here or there?). He actually believes that there were theological
scholastic disputes regarding the number of angels that can dance on the head of
the pin. He repeats as fact the long discredited myth that Christians destroyed the
works of Aristotle, or of Lucretius, or systematically burned the books of pagan
antiquity (the very opposite of what did in fact happen). He manages to quote
Tertullian correctly in Latin—credibile est, quia ineptum est—only then to
supply the traditional misquotation in English—“I believe because it is absurd”;
and he clearly is unaware of the point that (the lawyer) Tertullian is making
regarding judgments of a testimony’s credibility. He speaks of the traditional
hostility of “religion” (whatever that may be) to medicine, despite the monastic
origins of the modern hospital, or the involvement of Christian missions in
medical research and medical care from the fourth century to the present. He
tells us that countless lives were lost in the early centuries of the church over
disputes regarding which gospels were legitimate (the actual number is zero). He
asserts that Myles Coverdale and John Wycliffe were burned alive at the stake,
though both men died of natural causes. He knows that the last twelve verses of
Mark 16 are a late addition to the text, but imagines this means that the entire
account of the resurrection was as well. He thinks there is a passage in the
Inferno that describes Christ descending into hell to save great men like
Aristotle “who presumably had been boiling away for centuries” until then,
which is wrong in just about every detail. He informs us that it is well known
that Augustine was fond of the myth of the Wandering Jew, though Augustine
died eight centuries before the legend was invented. And so on and so on (and so
on). The man, to be frank, is at most a charmingly belligerent ignoramus.
In the end, though, all his errors of fact might be tolerated in a book that
had some rough semblance of a rational argument at its core. After all, there
really is a great deal to despise in the history of religion, even if Hitchens gets
almost all the particular details extravagantly wrong. But, to be perfectly honest,
I cannot tell what Hitchens’s central argument is. It is not even clear what he
understands religion to be, assuming he understands it to be anything other than
a general designation for everything in the world he dislikes. For instance, he
denounces female circumcision, commendably enough, but what—pray tell—
has that got to do with religion as such? Clitoridectomy is a widespread cultural
tradition, principally of sub-Saharan Africa, which is of course wholly
deplorable, and which is perpetuated by persons of various religious persuasions
or of none; but it is not a specifically religious practice as such. Similarly, he
takes indignant note of the plight of young Indian brides brutalized and
occasionally murdered on account of insufficient dowries, and we all no doubt
share his horror; but what the hell is his point? Such crimes are not prescribed by
any school of Indian piety. As best I can tell, Hitchens’s case against faith
consists mostly in a series of anecdotal enthymemes—that is to say, syllogisms
of which one premise has been suppressed. Unfortunately, in each case it is the
major premise that is missing; and since it is quite impossible at any given
moment to deduce what that premise is, it is also impossible to tell whether it
can quite supply the necessary logical ligature between the minor premise and
the conclusion. One need only attempt to write out his arguments in traditional
syllogistic style to see the difficulty. For instance:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Evelyn
Waugh was always something
of a bastard, and his Catholic
chauvinism often made him
even worse.
Conclusion: “Religion” is evil.
Or:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: There are
many bad men who are
Buddhists.
Conclusion: All religious
claims are false.
Or:
Major Premise: [omitted]
Minor Premise: Timothy
Dwight opposed smallpox
vaccinations.
Conclusion: There is no God.
It all seems rather hard to follow, frankly.