NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/talk/philosop/misc/2514

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From: [e-mail] (Peter Nyikos)
Subject: Ayn Rand on Religion [Was: Reply to Wingate]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Keywords: Rand Religion Wingate
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Organization: USC  Department of Computer Science
References: <[e-mail]>
Date: 18 Nov 92 00:43:29 GMT
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I have added talk.religion.misc

In <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Stimpson J. Katz) writes:

>I wrote:

>>As far as Rand's critique of religion, it boils down to the essential point
>>that religion makes no testable claims and therefore says nothing about
>>reality.

Every person tests the claims of Christianity when (s)he dies.  That we
do not know the outcome of the test for the people who preceded us, is
a perhaps temporary bit of ignorance.  Of course, if Ayn Rand is right,
and there is no afterlife, then the claims of Christianity are indeed
untestable in a certain sense (no one will ever know that the answer is No
if it really is No) but to say that Christianity makes no testable claims is to
do a really striking bit of question-begging.

>One need not prove a negative, Mr. Wingate.

This I call The Forensic Fallacy.  Debating societies have adopted
the convention that "The burden of proof is on the affirmative."
But this convention really makes sense only when the affirmative side
is proposing a change in the status quo of something, and it is risky
to transport this convention into debates where the point in dispute
is the very nature of the status quo itself.

In this case, which shall we call the affirmative side?  The side
that says the end of life is oblivion, or the side that says there is
life after death?  *One* status quo [hardly the most relevant one to a
true philosopher] is that perhaps more people in the
USA believe there *is* a life after death, so if one goes with the wisdom
of debating societies, such as it is, one would say it is incumbent on
those who believe otherwise to prove their case.

> It is incumbent upon those who
>assert something's existence to provide evidence to support it. The more
>fantastic the claim (ie: the more it conflicts with what one already knows)
>the more fantastic the evidence required. I leave it as an exercise for the
>reader to determine the fantasticness of the claims of religion.

Depends on which milieu you grew up in.  Many religious people have never
seriously entertained the possibility that death entails oblivion.

>I remember back when I was in college (University of Houston) a
>fundamentalist group (I believe it was Assemblies of God) held a
>debate (posters read, "There is no god ... or is there") and a few
>Objectivists showed up. One of them was a man of ordinary intelligence
>who "converted" a few months ago. He was easily able to fluster a man
>from this church who was their top debater in the South. Even observers
>who were members of the church found the Objectivist's points stronger,
>more rational, and more consistant.

I've listened to such debates, and I've cringed at the debating points
of *both* sides.  When I debated an Objectivist on this issue (I identified
myself as an agnostic) he gave me some mumbo jumbo about how "The universe
is all there is."  Turns out it was a barren tautology because he simply
DEFINED "the universe" to mean "all there is".  Never one to get hung
up on semantics, I told him, "OK then, the real issue is whether one
part of `the universe', which we call God, created all the rest."  All
he could do was point to something Nathaniel Branden had written, which
was just the same barren tautology expanded in disguised form to the
length of a page and say, "Personally, I think Branden's argument is a
good one."

Peter Nyikos