Zebedee do you have the comment still? Please post it here, would love to read it.
This guy is the new poster-child for western Islam.
And why do you say he's an Islamist
Why do I say he's an Islamist? Well, because he's for imposing Islamic Shari'ah in terms of, at least, finance and freedom of expression in the West. He completely eschews the Western notion of freedom of expression, and he thinks the Islamic model is better. I think that says it all.
And yes. I'm always sure to keep my long responses that I write to people. It was a response to his 'Response the The God Delusion.' Theists love that book, and no doubt because it's so utterly devoid of philosophical sophistication. Alas, that's the 'New Atheists' for you.
Here it is:
With regards to the 'fine-tuning' argument, I'm surprised that theists and atheists alike consistently fail to notice the glaring contradiction in it. That is, that it, despite being an argument in favour of theism, presupposes a default, uncreated set of physical rules around which the universe has to be fine-tuned.
A major premise of theism is that only God exists in a non-contingent capacity, but if God must configure the physical laws and constants in a very, very specific manner in order to create a life-permitting universe, then there must be a pre-existing order that restricts what God is able to do. If an omnipotent God exists, then there can be no restriction on its ability to create a life-permitting universe. The laws and constants would not have to be configured in any way, let alone so incredibly precisely.
The whole argument is predicated on the idea that the laws and constants have to be exactly what they are and can't be different because, if they were, life couldn't exist. However, that completely contradicts the idea of an all-poweful God. If this premise of the fine-tuning argument is the case, then it follows necessarily that theism isn't.
The attempt to use God to explain design or 'teleology' is much like the attempt to use God to explain existence itself. That is, completely futile. God itself exists and God itself has various highly unlikely attributes (like omniscience and omnipotence) that can have no cause or explanation. Theism asserts that a super-intelligent, highly sophisticated, omnipotent and willed being, which can have no possible cause or explanation, simply is the default state of existence. Surely the theistic God himself must wonder why even he exists, rather than not?
By contrast, entities that come about by natural processes, like animals, do have an explanation, even if we don't fully understand it or can't fully comprehend it in our minds, given the timespans involved.
God is actually not a good, let alone the best, explanatory hypothesis. It requires the belief that blind and purposeless metaphysical forces have conspired to produce a being that is omnipotent, omniscient and faultless. By contrast, the position of the metaphysical naturalist is that, given the right circumstances and in rare instances, blind and purposeless forces can produce life, with all its faults. Even then, the natural order is clearly orderly and evolution by natural selection is not an entirely unguided process. This cannot be said of some supernatural metaphysical configuration.
"Imagine 500 years from now, a group of archaeologists start digging in London’s Hyde Park only to find parts of a car and a bus. They would be completely justified in inferring that these finds were not the result of sedimentation and metamorphosis but products of an unknown civilization."
That is a fallacious comparison. Why? Because we know that past civilisations existed, we know that they made things. By contrast, we do not know if an immaterial, timeless and spaceless mind is even capable of existing. The two explanations cannot be compared.
"the very fact that we can observe and perform rational analysis on the patterns we perceive in the universe makes more sense if God did exist"
It makes perfect sense that we can understand the universe because we have evolved within it and are adapted to understand it. If we weren't, our species would have long since gone extinct. It would only be noteworthy if, despite having evolved within the universe and requiring to understand it to survive, we somehow were completely detached from it.
"it is more likely that God would create an ordered universe, and since the universe we live in is ordered..."
Really? To what extent? Most planets are lifeless, celestial bodies collide with each other all the time, up to and including entire galaxies. The Andromeda galaxy, for example, is approaching our own and will eventually collide with it. Granted, there is some order to the universe, but theism asserts a profound, perfect and causeless order, which goes further than naturalism.
Even down to the level of DNA one can perceive the disorderly and haphazard arrangement of the natural world. This is, of course, why diseases like neurofibromatosis or sickle-cell anaemia exist, why our genomes contain redundant and atavistic pseudogenes, and why about 8% of all human DNA is composed of viral DNA from ERVs.
The evidence that we see contradicts the Qur'an in Surat al-Mulk, verse 3: "You do not see in the Compassionate One’s creation, of these or of other things, any irregularity, any disparity or discordance." -- Jalalayn
Morality, on the other hand, is also a problem for the theist. The most obvious problem is the Euthyphro dilemma; i.e., is it good because God commands it or does God command it because it is good?
I believe that the Islamic stance is that things are neither intrinsically good or evil, but rather morality is determined purely by the dicates of Allah. This so-called 'divine command theory' of morality is every bit as arbitrary and subjective as many forms of atheistic morality. It forms no more sound a basis for objective morality than utilitarianism or consequentialism.
A good example would be that, according to Islamic creationism, Adam and Eve were the first humans and they were the progenitors of all mankind (Surat al-A'raaf:189, Surat al-Hujuraat:13) and so, their progeny would have had to resort to incest to produce the rest of the human race. Of course, incest is a sin in Islam, and yet Allah made it so that the human race could only come about by incest? The moral standard must have changed.
Another example is that slavery is permitted in Islam. We now understand that slavery is immoral, but Allah never claimed that it was. And while it's true that there are numerous ahadith that enjoin humane treatment towards slaves, one must acknowledge that the institution of slavery is inherantly immoral and inequitable, as I'm sure you'd grant.
Still, with regards to W.L.C.'s argument from objective morality; I see that you commit the same fallacy of begging the question in its presentation. You simply assert that objective morals exist yet completely neglect to support this hypothesis. Simply saying that we believe genocide is objectively wrong does not constitute an argument that shows that it is wrong. Indeed, it may well be immoral or evil, but this argument doesn't demonstrate that.
This is an argument that draws on human intuition, but which doesn't actually prove anything.
"However since our universe contains objective morality then it can only make sense with God’s existence, because God is required as rational basis for objective morality."
If our universe 'contains objective morality,' as you put it, then this morality must be objectively observable and demonstrable, and therefore perfectly natural and so would not require an appeal to the supernatural in order to be explained. Therefore, the existence of such a natural phenomenon would not prove the existence of a God. Any more than would, say, the existence of the universe itself.
"God is the only conceptual anchor that transcends human subjectivity."
What about mathematics? What about logic?
"In God’s absence, there are only two alternative conceptual foundations
1. Social pressure
2. Evolution"
I don't think so. Kant's theory of deontological ethics, for example, neither relies on the assumption of God's existence nor on social pressure or evolution. Similarly, consequentialism and utilitarianism don't depend on evolution or social pressure.
"God as a concept is not subjective"
Yes, it is. That's why, even within religions, the ideas of God's character and desires are very different from individual to individual.
"having God as the basis for morality makes them binding and objective, because God transcends human subjectivity."
If there existed a world-wide dictatorship that controlled every country on the globe and imposed its laws, that government's laws would transcend human subjectivity. However, these laws are not morally correct and truly binding just because they are imposed over all people.
The idea of a God dictating morality necessitates the same problem. God may have the power to impose his will and morals, but that doesn't necessarily make them correct or justified. God cannot dictate that a child be sacrificed to him every month, morally speaking. That would clearly be immoral. There is a standard outside of God that he himself must be bound by, hence why even he does not have the power to arbitrarily dictate what is moral and what is immoral.
This is the case because God, like any individual, is just another subjective consciousness and it is for this reason that he cannot dictate what is objectively moral.
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Topic: Islam or Atheism - The Big Debate