Comments on Naturalistic Atheism: Theism vs. Naturalism Debates: An Apples to Orange...

Naturalism is to Humanism as Theism is to Christia...

2006-12-10T16:04:00.000-08:00

Naturalism is to Humanism as Theism is to Christianity. In other words, Humanism and Christianity are full-blown worldviews or ideologies, while naturalism and theism are not.
However naturalism is a key philosophical ingredient of Humanism, and Theism is a key philosophical ingredient of Christianity (and the other big religions of the West).
A debate on Christianity vs Humanism would seem to be biting off more than one could reasonably chew, but a more focused debate on the key philosophical differences between these viewpoints seems worthwhile. A naturalism vs. theism debate seems like a good way to tackle part of the disagreement between Christianity and Humanism, and thus by the power of analysis (breaking a big problem down into more manageable pieces) to make some real intellectual progress towards a rational evaluation of the relative merits of these two worldviews/ideologies.
Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism would be worthwhile too. But supernaturalism can include worldviews that are quite a distance from Christianity, so such a debate might not be very helpful if the goal is to evaluate the relative merits of humanism vs. Christianity.

Hmmm... theism may be the most popular form of sup...

2006-09-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

Hmmm... theism may be the most popular form of supernaturalism today, but I'm not sure it's really more intrinsically probably than, say, animism. On your second point, I think it depends on how you define "God." The arguments you mention point towawrds a creator of great power, just not perfection.

Theism is the most plausible alternative to natura...

2006-09-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

Theism is the most plausible alternative to naturalism. It also has a much higher prior probability than rival supernatural hypotheses. So if one can show that theism has a low final probability, then that result, when combined with the low prior probability of rival supernatural hypotheses and the explanatory inferiority of those hypotheses, goes a long way towards establishing that naturalism has a high prior probability.

BTW, your observation could be easily modified to apply to many theistic arguments. Consider, for example, the fine-tuning argument (or, more accurately, the various versions of the fine-tuning argument). If you think about it, many (if not all) of the various evidential arguments for theism based upon fine-tuning aren't so much arguments for theism as they are arguments against naturalism (though, of course, in some sense they are both).

One thing that struck me as off about your debate ...

2006-09-16T16:29:00.000-07:00

One thing that struck me as off about your debate with Fernandes is that you were ostensibly defending naturalism, but with the possible exception of your first argument all of them were targeted at the theistic God, not supernaturalism in general. It's not a huge problem, but it's still poor labling.