Atheism's Dishonest Redefinition of Faith

Atheist popularizers dishonestly conflated faith with blind faith to support their dishonest argument that materialism has evidence while no religion has evidence.

It's human nature to get frustrated, even angry, when people use dishonest arguments to argue against your position. Atheists always irritate me by using a dishonest definition of faith to score rhetorical, but illogical, points. Most do so in ignorance, so I have to practice some self-control when responding. If I point out the dishonesty of the rhetoric, I have to emphasize that I'm accusing the originators of the trick of dishonesty, not them.

Faith is not necessarily decided in the absence of evidence. That definition was popularized over the couple of decades by promoters of Atheism such as Dawkins and Boghosian. Those pop-science writers equivocated by conflating faith with blind faith. 

Faith, honestly defined, is active trust in the absence of absolute proof. I use the redundancy in “absolute proof” for emphasis. Blind faith is a subset; classifying all faith as meeting the definition of blind faith and then relegating faith to religion, to the exclusion of other matters, especially science, was deceptive rhetoric on the part of the popularizers.

Belief overlaps faith because it is a decision about a claim. The difference is that faith is active. Faith influences decisions, whereas belief can be active or passive. That is, one can accept a claim “in theory” without letting it influence decisions. 

(Grammatically, believe is a transitive verb: one believes a claim. Sometimes, the believed claim is implied. In contrast, faith is a noun that labels an active belief.) 

Can anthropogenic climate change be proven? No. Can the claim be believed? Yes. Can one put faith in it? Yes. Is there sufficient evidence (e.g., long-term history or evidence that politically- or career-motivated managers in the science industry fudge the numbers) to create reasonable doubt? Also yes.

Since issues such as climate change depend on evidence in the absence of proof, believe and faith are perfectly applicable terms in the realm of science. Technically, they lie outside the rules of the process of science, but they certainly apply to scientists, the public, and the policies and cancel culture that rely on scientific issues and evidence. One can honestly conclude, based on observation,  that fearmongering over climate-change crosses into religious (or at least ideological) zeal. 

To say that faith applies to religion and not to science is to mislead — and on the part of Atheists who popularized the bad definition, to use such rhetoric is to deceive. 

Copyright 2021, Richard Wheeler. Permission granted for non-remunerated use.

Another Silly Question about God's Origin

From answering a question on Quora:

Does God know where he came from?

The question assumes that God “came from” somewhere. According to Christian scriptures, theology, and philosophers, God created the universe. Without a universe, no “then,” “there,” “source,” or “cause” existed from which God could come. So the question is broken.

Perhaps the asker meant, “What was the source or origin of God?” Again, without time, sequences such as going from non-existence to cause, to creation, to existence are nonsensical. Nevertheless, many Atheists ask the same question differently, asking, “Who created God?”

If God had a creator, who created him? And who created the Creator’s creator? And who created the Creator’s creator’s creator? Once you insist that the Creator had to have a creator, you create an infinite regression. It doesn’t work. If you started at a time infinitely in the past, and then pass through time, you could never get to our “now” because that would take an infinite length of time. In an infinite length of time, no matter how much time passes, there’s still more time that needs to pass before you can get to our “now.” Similarly, if you start with an infinitely precedent creator, you could never get to the current Creator. The assumption that God had a creator creates a mathematical impossibility.

The above analysis brings us to another problem. If God created the universe, then He created all the attributes and artifacts of the universe, including time, which cosmology and physics tell us had a beginning in the Inflationary period that became the Big Bang. If God created time, then He has an existence outside of time. And if God exists outside of time, then saying that He must have had a beginning and a creator is like saying that the number seven must have a color and a temperature. “Beginning” is meaningless without time, so, again, the assumption that God had a beginning creates a practical impossibility.

The question is in the class of questions such as “Why did God do this?” and “Why didn’t God to that?” It requires knowing the mind of God. Such questions require either God revealing His knowledge or reasoning to us, speculating, or reading god’s mind. I’m not a god, and I don’t believe anybody else who uses Quora is a god, either, so reading the memories in God’s mind is out of the question. That leaves us with either revelation or speculation. According to revelation through the Christian scriptures, God is self-existent and created the universe. From that, we can say that God does not "know" the incorrect assumption that He had an origin. If you reject revelation, then giving an authoritative answer is impossible. And the impossibility of giving an answer can only prove, at best, human limitations.

There’s a common practice of posing rhetorical questions as a substitute for actual arguments. Rhetorical questions can be used to hide false assumptions and faulty logic. The person answering the question has to restate the question as a claim and then detect the assumptions and logic and their flaws. So, if the intent is to discourage belief in God, the question is more specious than logical. (I don’t assume that the asker had that intent. I’m just pointing it out because others do use such flawed rhetoric.)

To sum up, the question is a non sequitur, meaning that it assumes facts not in evidence. And the concise answer is, no, God would not “know” something that is impossible and meaningless.

For further background:

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3gdeV4Rk9EfL-NyraEGXXwSjDNeMaRoX

Copyright 2020, Richard Wheeler. Feel free to use for non-remunerated purposes, but please give credit where credit is due.

Donald Trump's Tax Returns and Ties to Russian Oligarchs

How likely is it that Donald Trump's tax returns indicate that he is financially tied to Russian oligarchs?

Ties to Russia

The intent of the question is to imply that Trump has a conflict of interest and might be allied with Russia against America. I find that intent to be saturated with hypocrisy as well as with dishonest reasoning.

• Hillary is an internationalist, and her party is the party of internationalism. Therefore, when partisans accuse Trump of internationalism in his business, they commit hypocrisy.
  
• Internationalists believe Russo-American ties are good. When they imply that Trump is anti American because he has Russo-American ties, they add another layer of hypocrisy.
  
• The Democrat campaigns have worked hard to set up Russia as a bogeyman and link Trump to Russia, even when evidence has pointed to their own people as sources of some leaks. At the same time, they have lied about whether hackers ever obtained Hillary’s emails. (Guccifer 1.0 is in prison because of it.) Therefore, the accusation implied by the titular question loses credibility.
  
• While Trump’s ties to Russia are speculative, Hillary’s ties are not. We know that the Clintons and their foundations received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian oligarchs while Hillary was SecState. More hypocrisy.
  
• While we know of no anti-American actions by Trump that correspond to speculative ties to Russia, we do know that after receiving donations from Russia, Hillary enabled a mining deal that favored Russia and that had a significant negative impact on American interests. The circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and damning.
  
• All of this hypocrisy demands the question of whether the Left is leveling its speculative accusations against Trump in order to deflect attention away from Hillary’s known corruption. Such deflection is a common tactic of cover-ups.
  
• We have circumstantial evidence of complicity with a cover-up in the mainstream media. The story of the Clintons receiving hundreds of millions in “donations” was not covered. However, a story about a former Trump campaign employee receiving 1/100th as much did receive coverage. Keep in mind the context: Hillary’s action gave American interests to Russia; the Trump associate’s action brought Russian business to the US.
  
• A financial relationship with Russians does not create a conflict of interest for a businessman, but the Clintons’ financial relationship with “Russian oligarchs” while Hillary was in office does create a conflict of interest. At best, the Clintons created a prosecutable appearance of impropriety, and at worst, participated in bribery on a level that would have gotten a bureaucrat executed in some countries.

The level of hypocrisy, dishonesty, and brutal partisanship underlying the question is astounding. And that is not speculation.

The Tangent Followed by Most Commenters

Because most commenters go on a tangent about why Trump has delayed releasing his tax forms, I will address that, too.

Here is a factual reason for a delayed release. It may be Trump’s primary reason; it may not.

If you ask ten IRS employees for an interpretation of the tax code, you will get ten different opinions. It is inevitable that an audit will result in changes to some details of any tax return as complex as Trump’s. If Trump releases his return now, then when the changes due to the audit are released, partisans on the Left will accuse him of lying on the initial submission. After that, the changes will have to ripple through his much more thorough financial statement, and he will be accused of lying again.

That puts Trump in a lose-lose situation. If he releases the initial returns, he’s unjustly accused of lying, but if he delays, he’s accused of hiding something “*whore*-able,” as Hillary dramatically pronounced it.

As I said, this is fact, not speculation. Whether it is his reason, I don’t know, and you cannot say it isn’t if you are honest with yourself.

Now, this is more speculative: Courts have agreed that the Obama Administration has used the IRS to target people and organizations on its “enemies list.”  The IRS’s pattern of auditing Trump is consistent with that criminal abuse of power. Might some future email leak show that the Democrats conspired to put Trump in this lose-lose situation? Perhaps not, but it is more likely that a lot of the speculation I see others listing as “probable.”

Many commenters demonstrate a pitiful lack of critical reasoning. For example, one commenter lists a variety of reasons and calls all of them probable, even though some may be mutually exclusive. This demonstrates a failure to distinguish between the probable and the possible, as well as a refusal to acknowledge possibilities that might be entirely innocent.

In another bogus argument, people say Trump can release his tax forms just because the IRS does not stop him. They falsely reason that the absence of one barrier means that no barriers exist.

Partisanship is driving a spectacular level of hypocrisy and downright stupidity in this election. You can’t even read a question without tripping over a rhetorical trick, distortion of fact, or logical fallacy. And judging from the comments, the corrupt, the liars, the hypocrites are winning.

Copyright 2016