I've been delaying posting because, as I explained in my last post, I'm busy in personal projects which include "hands-on" investigation of putative paranormal and supernatural phenomena. The results of this research will be published in the future in a series of posts, or perhaps in a new blog specially created to that effect.
In this moment, I want to comment briefly about a book that I've just finished to read: atheist A.C.Grayling's The God Argument.
This is one of the worst books that I've read regarding the "God topic". The book is full of fallacies, inconsistences and misunderstandings of the basic arguments for God's existence.
I'll review the book in detail in the future, but just as an example: In page 77, he says:
explaining something by something unexplained amounts, obviously, to no explanation at all
But this is "obviously" and simply false. You can explain X by invoking Y, even if in that moment Y remains unexplained. A couple of examples:
1-AIDS was explained in 1983 as a disease caused by a virus (HIV), but in the time HIV remained unexplained (i.e. its origin and cause was unknown in 1983). Did such fact prevent medical scientists to explain the cause of AIDS in terms of HIV?
2-The Big Bang theory explains the origin of the material universe. But the cause or origin of the big bang is itself still unexplained (in fact, hardly any naturalistic explanation will succeed, because it is nature itself = the material universe itself which began to exist, and you cannot explain the absolute origin of matter appealing to a material cause).
3-Suppose, for the argument's sake, that the afterlife is empirically proven to exist beyond of doubt and to the entire satisfaction of "skeptics" like Randi, Dawkins or Keith Augustine (e.g. in cases of NDEs under laboratory conditions). In this case, "survival of consciousness" would be the best explanation of such NDEs, but consciousness itself would remain unexplained (= where consciousness come from? Why does it survive death? What or who caused it? Is it uncaused? Where it goes after leaving the body? Is consciousness eternal? Is consciousness an emanation from God?). In order to the accept that "survival of consciousness" is the best empirical explanation of NDEs, you don't need an explanation of consciousnss itself.
In other words, you don't need an explanation of the explanation in order to accept an explanation as the best. Otherwise, it would lead to an infinite regress, and nothing whatsoever (including AIDS, the Big Bang, evolution by natural selection, etc.) could in principle to be explained, because nobody possess an infinite number of explanations.
As Oxford atheist philosopher Daniel Came comments:
an explanation to be successful we do not need an explanation of the explanation. One might as well say that evolution by natural selection explains nothing because it does nothing to explain why there were living organisms on earth in the first place; or that the big bang fails to explain the cosmic background radiation because the big bang is itself inexplicable
Grayling's fallacious principle, if applied consistently (and not only against theism) would destroy science. As philosopher William Lane Craig comments (on Dawkins' use of Grayling's fallacious principle, which is rampant among atheist pseudo-intellectuals and other contemporary irrationalists):
Grayling's fallacious principle is a fine example of what researcher Dean Radin has called "uncontrolled criticism":
It is commonly thought that all criticisms in science are equal. This is not so. In fact, criticisms must have two properties to be valid. First, it must be controlled, meaning that the criticism cannot also apply to well-accepted scientific disciplines. In other words, we cannot use a double standard and apply one set of criticisms to fledgling topics and an entirely different set for established disciplines.
Radin's principle of "valid criticisms" apply in general, not only to science. You cannot swallow a bunch of scientific theories which invoke "unexplained" causal entities (e.g. HIV in the case of AIDS in 1983), and in the same time to complain that theism is not an explanation (e.g. of the absolute origin of the material world, of consciousness in the world, of spiritual and religious experiences, of the fine-tuning of the universe, of an objective realm of moral values, etc.) arguing that God itself is an unexplained causal entity.
You don't need an explanation of the explanation in order to accept an explanation as the best.
See other examples of Grayling's reasonings in this short video of a debate with Christian philosopher Peter S. Williams:
Authors like Grayling are telling examples of the intellectual, philosophical and moral poverty of contemporary atheism, and their fate will be, eventually (when the most sophisticated defenses of theism become well-known to the public), permanent extinction and rejection from the literary world.
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