(April 17, 2012 at 7:29 pm)genkaus Wrote:(April 17, 2012 at 7:16 pm)teaearlgreyhot Wrote: ...
What's there to refute?
Firstly, Craig's assertion that evolution and conditioning always lead to skepticism is false. Waves of theists rise in evidence against this claim. If skepticism were the automatic result of evolution and social conditioning, then everyone would be a skeptic.
Secondly, even if that assertion was true - so what? Skepticism doesn't mean that you shouldn't believe anything, it means that you shouldn't believe anything without sufficient evidence. So, even the claim that our belief system is a result of evolution and social conditioning requires evidence and given the preponderance of evidence for it, you should believe it.
Hmm. I think what Craig is trying to say is that the argument suffers from similar problems that a statement such as "everything is subjective" suffers from which is a self-refuting statement since the claim itself is objective. I don't think he's saying that evolution leads to skepticism in itself. He's saying that using evolution to explain moral tendencies and only moral tendencies is an arbitrary stopping point because there's no reason not to then ask "...is reason merely the result of evolutionary processes too?" Basically, he thinks this boils down to equivalent of saying "everything is the result of evolutionary processes" which would supposedly then makes this statement self-refuting because "everything" includes knowledge, reason, truth, etc, which the statement itself is trying to use to prove its point.
My ignore list
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
"The lord doesn't work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his nonexistence."
-- George Yorgo Veenhuyzen quoted by John W. Loftus in The End of Christianity (p. 103).
