Ben Wallis’s counter-apologetics blog

 In this podcast, I discuss the historicity of the empty tomb narratives, in the context of Christian apologetics.  Link below. https://ia801500.us.archive.org/33/items/2020-07-13-podcast-empty-tomb-lib_202007/2020-07-13-podcast-empty-tomb-LIB.mp3

https://archive.org/download/benwallis_podcast_2020-05-27_LIB/benwallis_podcast_2020-05-27_LIB.mp3 I discuss why I don't believe in the vision or hallucination hypotheses to explain the reports of post-mortem appearances of Jesus to his disciples.

In this podcast, I discuss my criticisms of Craig's defenses for the Kalam's first premise. https://archive.org/download/podcast2020-05-20-LIB/podcast2020-05-20-LIB.mp3

With fresh eyes, I revisited Plantinga's "victorious" modal ontological argument (hereafter, VMOA) yesterday.  Some summaries of the argument, including the one at IEP, has Plantinga defining the term 'maximally great being' (hereafter, MGB) to be such that if it's possible an MGB exists, then an MGB actually exists, and has the properties of omnipotence, omniscience, and moral perfection.  On the IEP's account, Plantinga's argument really only has one premise, and the conclusion follows immediately. It turns out that IEP's summary is incorrect.  Plantinga's argument has a number of different premises, and he doesn't ever explicitly define anything.  His approach, instead, is to let the reader supply their own intuitive understandings of a given concept.  Sometimes he'll help this process along by giving examples, or brief conceptual sketches. In one case (as we shall see momentarily) he actually gives an analysis---although that...

Bruce Reichenbach wrote the SEP article on cosmological arguments.  SEP articles are, I believe, peer-reviewed, and so we shouldn't expect them to contain invalid arguments.  This one does, however.  Here it is: (1) A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it could have not-existed or could cease to exist) exists. (2) This contingent being has a cause of or explanation for its existence. (3) The cause of or explanation for its existence is something other than the contingent being itself. (4) What causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must either be solely other contingent beings or include a non-contingent (necessary) being. (5) Contingent beings alone cannot provide a completely adequate causal account or explanation for the existence of a contingent being. (6) Therefore, what causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must include a non-contingent (necessary) being. (7) Therefore, a necessary being (a b...

Ben Wallis podcast 4/26/2020 - Hume, Craig, and Miracles In this podcast, I discuss a common criticism of Hume.

Ben Wallis podcast 3/30/2020 - A skeptic's response to the Kalam cosmological argument In this podcast, I discuss how I think skeptics should respond to the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Last week I started reading about free will. That's right---last week ! I've been studying philosophy in my spare time for the last fifteen years; why did it take me so long to finally broach what is considered one of its most fundamentally important topics? Well first of all, it's perhaps not as important as it might seem; for instance the late Buddhist philosopher Michael Dorfman once called the free will problem "much ado about nothing." Meanwhile, none of the discussion about free will whose snippets I encountered seemed very intriguing to myself, whose chief areas of interest lie in epistemology, mind, and the nonexistence of God. Finally, the very concept of free will just seemed unnecessarily obscurist, whereas I desire clarity. So, if I could just get by without ever having to discuss free will, that would be extremely gratifying. So, what changed? Well, to put it simply, I encountered Tim Stratton's "freethinking argument against natu...

I want to post this more or less for reference, because even though it's just a simple observation, it has serious implications for the argument of Robin Collins. Usually, when a professional philosopher publishes an argument in a peer-reviewed journal or book, certain things are taken for granted, like the validity of any deductive arguments given in it. So it's a pretty straightforward matter to make sure that one's central argument, if it's intended to be deductively valid, is *in fact* deductively valid. But Robin Collins' argument is not. Here's an excerpt from the book: "(1) Given the fine-tuning evidence, LPU is very, very epistemically unlikely under NSU: that is, P(LPU|NSU & k') << 1, where k' represents some appropriately chosen background information, and << represents much, much less than (thus making P(LPU|NSU & k') close to zero). (2) Given the fine-tuning evidence, LPU is not unlikely under T: that is...

When? Friday, Oct 24, 7-9:30pm Where? Hickory Hills Presbyterian Church , 8426 W 95th St, Hickory Hills, IL 60457 ( map ) What? The debate topic is: Does God exist? Who? I will be debating Dr. Kirk MacGregor . About the Debaters Kirk MacGregor (Ph.D. in religious studies, University of Iowa) teaches religion and philosophy at Carthage College and the College of DuPage. He is the Director of the Chicago Chapter of Reasonable Faith. His research has been published in the Harvard Theological Review and Philosophia Christi. Ben Wallis (M.S. in pure mathematics, Northern Illinois University) teaches mathematics at Northern Illinois University and Kishwaukee College. With interests in philosophy of religion, he co-hosted the podcast Goodness Over God from 2011 to 2012. His research has been published in the Journal of Functional Analysis. Debate website (facebook)

Seminary student Sungyak Kim has an unusual vision of Christian apologetics. Quoting Soren Kierkegaard, he laments the existence of that apparently typical apologist who naively attempts to "deal with every accusation, every falsification, every unfair statement, and in this way is occupied early and late in counterattacking the attack." And who exactly does he have in mind, here? Well, it's hard to say exactly, but at the beginning of his piece he drops the names of William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga.

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has developed and defended an increasingly popular forumlation of the moral argument for the existence of God: (1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. (2) Objective moral values and duties do exist. (3) Therefore, God exists. ( Reasonable Faith , p172.) His principal defense for premise (2) consists in pointing to our moral experience, where he thinks we apprehend the objectivity of morality. However I will argue that while there may be a semantic sense in which our moral experience does offer evidence for the objectivity of morality, nevertheless Craig has in mind a different, specialized sense of objectivity which involves the existence of a concrete exemplar, and which is unsupported by experience.

Recall that Joshua Rasmussen in his "New Argument for a Necessary Being" (2011), argues that (1) Normally, for any intrinsic property p that (i) can begin to be exemplified and (ii) can be exemplified by something that has a cause, there can be a cause of p's beginning to be exemplified. (p1) When I expressed concerns with his published defense of (1), he (first privately, and later publicly ) offered the following supplement (my paraphrase): Consider mundane intrinsic properties of the form being an apple , or being aluminum , etc., which can begin to be exemplified. Clearly such properties possibly have a cause for their exemplification, and so inductively we infer (1).

Christians face an interesting theological challenge regarding the crucifixion of Jesus, insofar as we want to know why Jesus had to suffer in order to save the faithful. God, being omnipotent, appears to have the power to save the faithful, regardless of whether he also sent Jesus to suffer on the cross. In order to explain why it was better for him to do so, we might be tempted to invoke the notion of justice. However, if we want to appeal to God's favorite system of justice to explain why Jesus had to suffer, then we must know why that system is ultimately good for us. Since we do not in fact know how God's rules of cosmic justice are ultimately good for us, then no appeal to those rules will serve as a satisfactory explanation.

The complexity of philosopher Alvin Plantinga's well-known evolutionary argument against naturalism (hereafter EAAN) affords the skeptic a variety of avenues for criticism. Of these, I prefer to focus on the objections that, first, we cannot be rationally obligated to stop depending on our cognitive faculties since it is quite impossible for us to rationally do so, and second, the sort of skepticism which Plantinga describes, if indeed it poses any danger at all, applies as well to the theist as it does the naturalist unless we already have reason to suppose that theism is true.

Joshua Rasmussen in his "New Argument for a Necessary Being" (2011), argues that (1) Normally, for any intrinsic property p that (i) can begin to be exemplified and (ii) can be exemplified by something that has a cause, there can be a cause of p's beginning to be exemplified. (p1)

The Reasonable Doubtcasters have produced two marvelous episodes critiquing Van Tilian presuppositionalism: episode one and episode two .

William Lane Craig uses Hilbert's hotel in an attempt to illustrate the impossibility of an existing actually infinite multitude, but I find several serious gaps in his arguments which, in my judgment, prevent them from having any force. His approach takes two forms: First, he claims that certain logical contradictions follow from the existence of actual infinites; second, his intuition tells him that an existing infinite multitude is absurd. In response, I want to resolve the alleged contradictions, and argue that intuition is an unreliable guide to the possibility or impossibility of an existing actual infinite.

WLC suggests we characterize objective morality in terms of God's nature. In particular, he suggests a form of DCT, that "God's own nature is the standard of goodness, and his commandments to us are expressions of his nature" ( On Guard , pp135-6). The obvious reply here is that we can conceive a God whose commandments are morally wrong; so for instance we can envision a God who expresses his nature by commanding, say, a father to sacrifice his son. Clearly this would be an immoral act, and since definitions are true essentially it shows that morality is not defined by God's nature. WLC anticipates this sort of objection, but complains that the envisioned scenario is "logically impossible," on par with suggesting that a square can also be a circle (p136). On his view, of course, that's true enough---but if the contradiction only manifests when we assume DCT in advance, then that just goes to show that DCT is wrongheaded. Since we know human sac...

Dr. James Anderson has recently completed, with Greg Welty, the forthcoming paper "The Lord of Non-Contradiction," in which he argues for the existence of God from the laws of logic. We may divide the argument into two portions, the first where he holds that there is a necessarily existent mind, and the second that such a mind must be the mind of God. His summary of the first part of the argument proceeds thusly: "The laws of logic are necessary truths about truths; they are necessarily true propositions. Propositions are real entities, but cannot be physical entities; they are essentially thoughts. So the laws of logic are necessarily true thoughts. Since they are true in every possible world, they must exist in every possible world. But if there are necessarily existent thoughts, there must be a necessarily existent mind" (p20). Of course this is a summary only, and in the full paper each step in this argument is carefully defended with sub-arguments. For my o...