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From: aa888@freenet.carleton.ca (Mark Baker)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: The arrogance of Christians
Message-ID: <Apr.13.00.08.07.1993.28379@athos.rutgers.edu>
Date: 13 Apr 93 04:08:08 GMT
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Reply-To: aa888@freenet.carleton.ca (Mark Baker)
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In a previous article, dleonar@andy.bgsu.edu (Pixie) says:

>     Do the words "Question Authority" mean anything to you?
>
>     I defy any theist to reply.      

Well, despite what my mother told me about accepting dares, here goes.
 
You have to be very careful about what you mean by "question authority".
Taken literally, it is nonsense. That which is authoratative is authoratative,
and to say "I question to word of this authority" is ridiculous. If it is 
open to question, it isn't an authority. On the other hand, it is perfectly
reasonable to question whether something is an authority. The catch phrase
here should be "authenticate authority." Once you have authenticated
your authority, you must believe what it says, or you are not treating it as
an authority. 

The difficulty is that authenticating an authority is not easy. You 
can perhaps discredit a claim to authority by showing logical inconsistency
in what it teaches, or by showing that it does not obey its own rules of
discourse. But the fact that I cannot discredit something does not, in
inself, accredit it. (Nor does the fact that I can convince myself and 
other that I have discredited something necessarilly mean that it is false.)
I cannot accredit an authority by independantly verifying its teachings, 
because if I can independantly verify its teachings, I don't need an 
authority. I need an authority only when there is information I need which
I cannot get for myself. Thus, if I am to authenticate an authority, I must
do it by some means other than by examining its teachings. 

In practical matters we accept all kinds of authorities because we don't
have time to rediscover fundamental knowledge for ourselves. Every scientist
woring today assumes, on the authority of the scintific community, all sorts
of knowledge which is necessary to his work but which he has not time to 
verify for himself.

In spiritual matters, we accept authority because we have no direct source 
ofinformation. We select our authorities based on various criteria. (I am
a Catholic, in part, because the historical claims of the RC church seem
the strongest.) Without authorities there would be no subject matter for
belief, unless we simply made something up for ourselves (as many do).

The atheist position seems to be that there are no authorities. This is a
reasonable assertion in itself, but it leads to a practical difficulty.
If you reject all authority out of hand, you reject all possibility of
every receiving information. Thus the atheist position can never possibly
change. It is non-falsifiable and therefore unscintific. 

To demand scintific or rational proof of God's existence, is to deny
God's existence, since neither science, nor reason, can, in their very
nature, prove anything.



-- 
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Mark Baker                  | "The task ... is not to cut down jungles, but 
aa888@Freenet.carleton.ca   | to irrigate deserts." -- C. S. Lewis
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