how weird am I?

seriously, how weird am I?

I have been watching the dialogue between Mark Krikorian, Wesley Smith and Jonah Goldberg in The Corner with great interest. They are talking about vegans and vegetarians, morality and whether or not it is morally permissible to eat meat etc. Really good stuff and very interesting.

Anyway, today Jonah posts this email correcting a philosophical point that Jonah made about the persuasiveness of one of Wesley’s points.

Paragraphs like these two just tickle my brain and make me happy. The last sentence especially just makes me want to jump up and click my heels together:

Here’s an example of a valid moral conclusion drawn from a factual premise: “Putting arsenic in a dog’s food will poison him [scientific fact]. It is wrong to poison dogs [moral premise]. Therefore, it is wrong to put arsenic in a dog’s food [moral conclusion].” Whether or not you agree that it’s wrong to poison dogs, there’s nothing invalid or fallacious about the argument.

So I don’t think Wesley Smith committed a mistake in moral reasoning. He just left implicit a key assumption: that the normal operations of our bodies reveal what it is morally permissible for us to do. Although that’s a controversial statement, it captures a bedrock principle of the influential school of moral philosophy known as natural law (members include Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Pope Benedict). It isn’t at all fallacious. Smith’s argument would defeat the arguments of the vegetarians if the burden of proof is on them, but it would require quite a bit more dialectical work if the burden of proof is on him.

emphasis added

so, how weird does that make me?

Carl Trueman on Hurt Mail

I’m so Hurt. it isn’t just an Elvis song anymore. Now it has become a tool in the hands of the mau mau crowd in their effort to shut up arguments they don’t like.

Carl Trueman is on flaming fire with this one. Love it, Love it, Love it.

here is a tease, but you have to read it all. every delicious word. there is no way any snippets can do it justice.

But I think there is more to this phenomenon of hurt and pain than a mere aping of the culture. It is more cunning and dishonest than that, Over the last couple of years, I have noticed that the hate mail in my inbox has been replaced by what I now call hurt mail. Now, the agenda of your typical hate mailers is pretty straightforward: they are simply attempting to intimidate or humiliate the recipient into silence. What you see is what you get. Hurt mailers, by comparison, are rather more subtle and duplicitous: by claiming pain, they immediately do two things. First, they make themselves the poor victims; and second, they imply that the targets of this hurt mailing are intentionally malicious perpetrators. The game is precisely the same as with hate mail — to make someone whom they dislike or whose opinions they discount shut up — but the tactic is different: to win by seizing the moral high ground that belongs to the professional victim.

…..
Expressions of hurt are too often really something else: cowardly attempts by representatives of a cosseted and self-obsessed culture to make themselves uniquely important or, worse still, to bully and cajole somebody they dislike to stop saying things they don’t want to hear or which they find distasteful.

hat tip to Challies, but I also saw someone refer to this article on their twitter feed yesterday.

JD Greear on straw man arguments

JD Greear takes on the task of teaching Bart Ehrman a little something about argumentation. Excellently done.

But surely Dr. Ehrman must realize that Bible scholars have demonstrated that Jesus’ claim to deity in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) are MUCH more substantial than he suggests to his students. They are not as blatant as Jesus walking around saying “I am God,” but just as significant. Ehrman does not address these more sophisticated arguments, ignoring them as if all Christianity had to offer were clever, anecdotal slights of hand.

Take, for instance this lengthy passage from N.T. Wright about Jesus’ claims to be God from an appendix in the great book by Antony Flew, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Why doesn’t Ehrman address this argument in class? Why pick on a weak argument as if that is all Christianity has to offer? To disagree with it would be one thing, to pretend it doesn’t even exist and beat up something weak in its place is not responsible argumentation.

…..[extended quote in here from N.T. Wright. Go take a look at it]

Dr. Ehrman did not deal with reasoning such as this. He took a rather weak argument used by middle school youth camp speakers and presented it as if it was “the best Christianity has to offer.” He did not bring up what Christian scholars on his level actually have to say about it. This is known as “straw man argumentation.”……Setting up weak arguments that do not represent the best of genuine Biblical argumentation and then knocking them down is not “fair” argumentation practice or good scholarship.

ouch. that will leave a mark.

brave new digital world

Vitamin Z points to a First Things article called iPhones Have Consequences.

Sally Thomas takes a look at the effect that internet access ubiquity has had on the education of kids. It is not a pretty picture. Here are four quick hits, but you have to go read the whole thing.

The project of Emory professor Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30, is to confront and dismantle the claim that digital technology is producing a higher-powered, better-informed, all-around smarter new generation than, say, the .01 percent of the Facebook population born in the 1960s.
…….

But he also asks why, with all these advantages, so many young Americans sound like the high-school student who called a talk-radio show to complain about “all the boring stuff the teachers assign,” like “that book about the guy. [Pause] You know, that guy who was great.” “You mean The Great Gatsby?” asked the host. “Yeah,” said the caller. “Who wants to read about him?” The cultural candy shop is open as it’s never been open before, but evidence suggests that the kids aren’t buying.

……

Their ignorance would seem outrageous if it didn’t sound just like the kind of thing my college-professor husband has been reading in student papers, hearing in conversations with students, and seeing in course evaluations for years. This is a 100-level course, and we shouldn’t be expected to do such complex reading, griped an entire chorus of students from a world-religions 101 course, for which the core text was a trade paperback that myhusband’s father, a college dropout, had once been assigned in a Sunday School class. In another religion class, a student paper referred repeatedly to something called the momentous island, a phrase that mystified my husband until he realized that what the writer meant was that infamous school-prayer compromise, the moment of silence.

…..

At its heart, Bauerlein’s book is not about machines at all but about what he calls “The Betrayal of the Mentors.” Simply put, the educational and cultural establishments have sold out tradition and authority in favor of “collaborative-learning” models and objectives like “working with every young person’s sense of self.” The average teenager, not surprisingly, views himself not as a student in need of enlightenment but as a kind of automatic savant.

……

Ideas have consequences and, according to Bauerlein, the consequence of this particular idea will be the coming of age of successive generations who know less and less about the ideas that gave us Western civilization, and who therefore have less and less investment in its continuation. “Knowledge,” writes Bauerlein, “supplies a motivation that ordinary ambitions don’t.”