Apologist Recommendation: Edward Feser

In this series, I will recommend certain scholars and apologists to our readers and listeners.  These are people that I believe are worth listening to because they are informed and give good arguments and insights into the subjects that they study, which helps intellectually equip Christians so that they can grow in their own faith and their outreach towards non-Christians.  I am not claiming that these scholars and apologists have everything correct, but I think they are intellectual powerhouses that we can learn much from.

Edward Feser

Dr. Feser is a Catholic philosopher who teaches at Pasadena City College.  Being a Catholic, his metaphysics is heavily influenced by Aquinas, which may make his philosophy slightly different from other well-known Christian apologists like William Lane Craig, but his material is still valuable.  A lot of his material is academic, but he has a lot of more popular-level materials that offer great arguments and insights.  Here are some of his works.

His Blog

Feser regularly writes on his blog, where you can find his thoughts on everything philosophy, theology, Catholicism, and apologetics.  This is a good place to go to introduce yourself to his material.

Atheism

Dr. Feser has a lot of scathing and often hilarious critiques of the "New Atheism" and particular atheist writers.  In book form, he wrote The Last Supertition, which is a critique of the new atheism.  His criticisms of Jerry Coyne are all entertaining to read.  He has a review of Coyne's book, Faith Versus Fact, on First Things.  You can also find his blog posts and articles critiquing Coyne here and here.  Feser also critiques Lawrence Krauss, a physicist and atheist, here.  He has a lot more material on atheism and responses to atheist apologists, so look them up.

Existence of God

Dr. Feser has also written on the arguments for the existence of God.  His new book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, is pretty self-explanatory.  Feser is also interviewed here, where he responds to Dawkins' critiques of the arguments for God's existence in his book, The God Delusion.

Misc.

I recommend just looking through his blog for more materials.  He has a lot of articles on philosophy of mind, ethical issues like sexual ethics, abortion, and capital punishment, explanations of Catholic docrines, and much, much more.  I hope you learn a lot from his resources.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 22

Aaron and I, prompted by an article on Quillette, talk about transgenderism and philosophy of mind issues.  This is part 1 of this topic.  We will get more into the metaphysics of mind in part 2.

Listen to the episode here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 18

I interview Dr. Greg Ganssle on fittingness arguments for God's existence and God of the Gaps arguments.  We discuss what fittingness arguments are, what fittingness arguments there are for theism, what fittingness arguments there are for atheism, and Greg responds to the arguments for atheism.  We finish off by giving an analysis of "God of the Gaps" arguments and responding to the charge that arguments for theism are God of the Gaps arguments.

Listen to the audio here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 7

Aaron, the 'A' of the 'AK', was not able to join us for his podcast, but in this episode I interview Dr. Neil Shenvi on the apparent conflict between Christianity and science.  We discuss whether or not secularism is rampant among scientists and the scientific "culture," the different conflicts between science and Christianity, and how a Christian can respond to those apparent conflicts.  Issues like evolution and the age of the earth are also brought up.

I'm still learning how to edit things, so the intro music still ends very suddenly, making it so that the transition from intro music to the actual discussion isn't very clean, but it's not a big problem and I'll learn.

Listen to the interview here on Anchor.

For more of Dr. Shenvi's materials, check out his website.

Apologist Recommendation: Neil Shenvi

In this series, I will recommend certain scholars and apologists to our readers and listeners.  These are people that I believe are worth listening to because they are informed and give good arguments and insights into the subjects that they study, which helps intellectually equip Christians so that they can grow in their own faith and their outreach towards non-Christians.  I am not claiming that these scholars and apologists have everything correct, but I think they are intellectual powerhouses that we can learn much from.

Neil Shenvi

Neil Shenvi has his Ph.D in theoretical chemistry from UC-Berkeley and was a research scientist at Yale and Duke University before becoming a homeschooler for his kids.  When we look at most of the scientifically trained critics of Christianity like Dawkins, Krauss, Stenger, and others, Christians often rightly notice that their knowledge and credentials as scientists does not make them intellectual heavyweights when it comes to philosophy, ethics, religion, history, theology, or any other subject that connects to apologetics.  Scientists who are critics of Christianity often make very elementary blunders because they are simply not well educated or well read in philosophy, theology, biblical studies, or history.  Dr. Shenvi, however, is an exception when it comes to scientists.  Having read his articles and seen his extensive interactions on Facebook, I can say firsthand that this guy is well versed in philosophy, ethics, and biblical studies.  His intelligence, thoughtfulness, winsomeness, and his ability to engage in multiple subjects of inquiry make him a valuable resource to Christians.

His Website

His website is, of course, the best place to look at his content.  Neil Shenvi-Apologetics is where you can find his essays, book reviews, talks, notes, and more.

The Resurrection and the Bible

As I've stated, he is well read in subjects outside of science.  He has material on evidence for the resurrection of Jesus in multiple places.

Christianity and Science

Being a scientist, he is well qualified to talk about sciences connection with Christianity.  He has talks on quantum mechanics and miracles and science and religion that you can check out.

Social Justice

Lately, Dr. Shenvi has been putting most of his time into learning about critical theory and intersectionality and how they have become part of the modern social justice movement.  This is an important topic in cultural apologetics.  His conclusion is that critical theory is a worldview that, while getting some things right and having some usefulness, has significant incompatibilities with the Christian worldview.  These two articles are where you can get his introduction to the ideas of social justice and critical theory and their compatibility with Christianity.  You can find his reviews and analysis of the books, Race, Class, and Gender, and Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, as a good start, but he also has other book reviews on the subject to look at.  You can also check out his interview on the subject if you would rather listen.

This should get you started on his material.  My understanding is that he is also in the process of writing a book defending Christianity, but it is not out yet.  I think this guy should have more recognition for his contribution, so I hope this post contributes to that.

Mackie’s Error Theory: Morality and Naturalism

This article was originally featured on ResistanceTV.

Brief Introduction

“There are no objective values.”  So starts the first chapter of J.L. Mackie’s book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, where he argues that there are no objective, universally prescriptive moral facts.

Moral facts are the things that make our moral judgments, like “It is wrong to rape people” or “We ought to treat everyone equally” true or false.  The view that moral facts exist is called moral realism or objectivism.  Mackie’s view is a cognitivist view, which means that our moral judgments express believes that have truth-value (they are either true or false), but it is not an example of moral realism.  Mackie argued that all of our moral judgments and beliefs are false.  This is why it is called “Error Theory.”  How does he argue for this position?

His argument combines a conceptual claim about our moral judgments and an ontological claim about the existence of moral facts.

1) Conceptual claim: Our moral concepts are concepts of universally prescriptive, categorical facts in the world.

2) Ontological claim: There are no such facts in the world.

Whether our beliefs are true or false depends on whether they correspond to reality.  If I believe “Earth has one moon,” that belief is true because Earth does, in fact, have one moon.  If I believe “My dog is the same as my cat,” then that belief is false because that belief does not correspond to reality.  My dog is not, in fact, my cat.  Since there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our beliefs about moral facts, our moral beliefs and claims are all false.  That is why Mackie’s view is called Error Theory, because we are literally in error.

Mackie’s Defense of His Claims

Mackie argues for (1) by showing that many philosophers in the Western tradition have defended objective moral values.  While acknowledging that many thinkers are moral subjectivists he says “the main tradition of European moral philosophy includes the contrary claim, that there are objective values of just the sort I have denied,” (p. 30).  He cites philosophers like Plato, Kant, Sidgwick, Aristotle, Samuel Clarke, Hutcheson, Richard Price, and says Hume noticed the prevalence of the objectivist tradition as well.  He also argues that the objectivist tradition has a firm basis in ordinary thought.  When many people ask if a certain action is wrong, they are not asking what they feel about the action or what benefit they think it will give them, they are asking if the action itself is wrong.  Mackie also claims that existentialism and its influence on people shows that people tend to objectify their concerns.  People who cease to believe that objective moral facts or values exist tend to begin believing that nothing matters at all; that life has no purpose.  This suggests that those people were objectifying their moral judgments so that they were something external to them, not just aspects of their own ideas, thoughts, and desires (p. 34).

Mackie argues for (2) in a few different ways, but the argument I will focus on here is the argument from queerness.

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.  Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty or moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. (p. 38)

In order to argue that moral facts do not exist, Mackie combines a metaphysical argument with an epistemological argument.  The metaphysical argument is that moral facts would be very “queer” properties unlike any other kinds of properties we know.  Moral facts are the kinds of things that have a demand for an action built into them.  They are prescriptive facts telling us how we ought to act.  The facts that we are all acquainted with, however, are prescriptively inert.  The facts or properties that we are all familiar with, physical properties, do not have demands for certain actions built into them.  They do not tell us how things ought to be, they just tell us how things are.  They are descriptive rather than prescriptive. These physical properties, which are descriptive properties that tell us how things are, are the kinds of properties that we are very well acquainted with and they are explicable on naturalism.  Moral properties, which are prescriptive properties that tell us how things ought to be, are strange and not easily explainable on naturalism, since the moral properties themselves would not be natural.

The epistemological argument is that we would need a special faculty that was able to detect these moral properties.  We have different faculties for detecting things in the world, and these faculties are how we gain knowledge about the world.  For example, our eyes pick up light and allow us to see, our noses detect scents in the air and allow us to smell, our ears detect the vibrations in the air and allow us to hear sound.  Through these different faculties we detect different things in the world and learn about them.  But what kind of faculty would we need to have in order to detect non-physical, universally prescriptive moral facts?  It is not clear what on earth this faculty could be or how we can gain knowledge of moral facts through it.  So, Mackie concludes from this that we have good reason to reject the actual existence of moral facts.

Conclusion

To sum up, Mackie claims that our moral concepts are concepts of universally prescriptive facts, but these facts do not exist in the world, so our moral concepts are literally false.  He argues against their existence by showing that such facts would be metaphysically “queer” on naturalism and it is not clear how we would even know their existence.

If Mackie is right, then a naturalist would have to deny moral facts because they are not the kinds of things that would be natural.  If one thinks that moral facts do exist, then one has reason to reject naturalism.

Resources

(1) Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Middelessex: Penguin, 1990. Print.

(2) Miller, Alexander. An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003. Print.