In the linked video, David Wood discusses the general intellectual dishonesty of Sam Harris. In this post, I zero in on a specific and long-standing example of the intellectual dishonesty of Harris and of 'atheists' in general.
@3:35 Sam Harris: "If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin ... that would be part of our rational world-view. It's only when people lose their purchase on evidence and argument, when they have bad reasons, that they talk about faith."
As is traditional with God-deniers, Sam Harris is asserting selective hyper-skepticism. It is not true that 'atheists' rationally deny the possibility of events which "break the laws of nature". Rather, they assert those possibilities as proven fact ... until some event which "breaks the laws of nature" is believed to have been deliberately and purposefully caused by God. Evangelical Atheists assert that you must believe in the possibility of events which "break the laws of nature", events which they also say no one has ever witnessed and no one is ever likely to witness, and which events are accidental and meaningless. And they assert that you are a fool, or at best an ignoramus, if you do not also assent to the possibility of these accidental and meaningless hypothetical events. Simultaneously, they assert that you are a fool, or at best an ignoramus, if you do believe the reports of people who claim to have witnessed and recorded certain events which "break the laws of nature" ... when those events are recorded in the Bible and are attributed to intentional and purposeful intervention in the regular working of the "laws of nature" by the Creator of the "laws of nature". ============ Consider this quote is from "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan "Consider this claim: as I walk along, time -as measured by my wristwatch or my ageing process -slows down. Also, I shrink in the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever witnessed such a thing? It's easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here's another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the universe, being created from nothing. Here's a third: once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street. They're all absurd! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum mechanics (vacuum fluctuations and barrier tunnelling,* they're called). Like it or not, that's the way the world is. If you insist it's ridiculous, you'll be forever closed to some of the major findings on the rules that govern the Universe. *The average waiting time per stochastic ooze is much longer than the age of the Universe since the Big Bang. But, however improbable, in principle it might happen tomorrow." ============ My response is: And, sometimes, iron axeheads which have flown off their handles and fallen into a pond or river float to the surface. [This is a reference to a miracle of the prophet Elisha, as recorded in II Kings 6:1-7] And, sometimes, the dead bodies of persons who really and truly are dead, rise back to life. [This is a reference to a number of resurrections recorded in both Old and New Testaments, including that of Jesus the Christ.] So, given what 'scientistes' (*) believe and assert about the nature of reality, how can their denial of, and refusal to believe, any of the miracles recorded in the Bible be anything other than selective hyper-skepticism, which is to say, intellectual dishonesty?(*) 'scientistes' is my mocking term, a la Miss Piggy, the Artiste, for those who assert scientism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EbsZ10wqnA
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