I agree with most of your last paragraph, namely that greedy and inhumane capitalism causes huge amounts of damage (arguably more so than religious ideologies), but that is not the discussion here. What, pray tell, is wrong (both morally and factually) with strongly denouncing Islam?

As for that appalling, intellectually dishonest hackjob of an article you link to (which of course uses the term "Islamophobia" non-ironically, displaying it's dishonesty from the get-go), PZ Myers expresses better than I would* how such atheist-bashing fails hard, with the bonus of putting Sam Harris in his place viz. "the war on terror" (Harris lost most of his credibility for me when he defended racial/religious profiling, and Dawkins when he took the wrong side in the feminism debate, but I digress).

If you really agree with the lines you quoted, you might want to read a history book or, you know, watch the news. I would snidely suggest you go live the life of a woman, atheist or homosexual (to name only a few) in a place ruled by religion if you still adhered to such a belief, but that would be meanness beyond even me.

*http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/03/both-wrong-both-right/
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/04/12/why-should-anyone-have-to-read-your-goofy-holy-book/

Okay. I have to lay down a lesson here for the folks in the video. This has been a pet peeve of mine for years, from Dawkins vs. Religion, to ignoramuses vs. education, BUT:
Showing a guy you agree with say something that's true, to counter a clip of a guy you disagree with saying something that's untrue, does not disprove him.
Just because I know, understand (and have a man-crush on) DeGrass Tyson, nothing he said in that short clip proved or disproved anything in the previous one.

This is an issue with the video editor/author, but this video is a clip of two guys saying opposite things. That is it. (Even if one of them used more words to do so, and happens to be right.)

It's journalistic-masturbation.

The video does not enlighten, inform, or disprove anything. If people want to truly break down the walls of ignorance, they absolutely must start "showing their work". You can't expect Limbaugh to go back to school just to reeducate himself.

If you are going to complain that Dawkins's response is inductive reasoning, then you cannot use scripture to justify your own argument as that is circular reasoning.

@alcom

I hear you shinyblurry, but I feel that your argument meanders back to the original appeal to authority that most believers resort to when justifying their positions. I also find that the related video links provided by TheGenk provide a valid refutation of the idea that God is The One who put values of good and evil inside each of us.

There is always an appeal to authority, either to God or to men. There are either objective moral values which are imposed by God, or morality is relative and determined by men. If morality is relative then there is no good or evil, and what is considered good today may be evil tomorrow. If it isn't absolutely wrong to murder indiscriminately, for instance, then if enough people agreed that it was right, it would be. Yet, this does not cohere with reality because we all know that murdering indiscriminately is absolutely wrong. The true test of a worldview is its coherence to reality and atheism is incoherent with our experience, whereas Christian theism describes it perfectly.

If you feel the videos provide a valid refutation, could you articulate the argument that they are using so we can discuss them here?

In my mind, Zacharias' incoherence with the atheist's ability to love and live morally is influenced by his own understanding of the source of moral truth. Because he defines the origin of pure love as Jesus' sacrifice on behalf of mankind, it is unfathomable to him that love could be found as a result of human survival/selection based of traits of cooperation, peace and mutual benefits of our social structure. His logic is therefore coloured and his mind is closed to certain ideas and possibilities.

The idea of agape love is a Christian idea, and agape love is unconditional love. You do not get agape love out of natural selection because it is sacrificial and sacrificing your well being or your life has a very negative impact on your chance to survive and pass on your genes. However, Christ provided the perfect example of agape love by sacrificing His life not only for His friends and family, but for people who hate and despise Him. In the natural sense, since Jesus failed to pass on His genes His traits should be selected out of the gene pool. Christ demonstrated a higher love that transcends the worldly idea of love. Often when the world speaks of love, it is speaking of eros love, which is love based on physical attraction, or philial love, which is brotherly love. The world knows very little of agape love outside of Christ. Christ taught agape love as the universal duty of men towards God:

Luke 6:27 "But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
Luke 6:28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Luke 6:29 To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.
Luke 6:30 Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back.
Luke 6:31 And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them.
Luke 6:32 "If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.
Luke 6:33 And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.
Luke 6:34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to get back the same amount.
Luke 6:35 But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil.
Luke 6:36 Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful.

Indeed, moral foundations can and must change with the times. As our understanding of empathy, personal freedoms and the greater good of mankind develops with our societal and cultural evolution, so too must our standards of morality. This is most evident when concepts such as slavery and revenge (an eye for an eye) are seen as commonplace and acceptable throughout old scripture where modern society has evolved a greater understanding of the need for equality and basic human rights and policing and corrections as a measure of deterrence and rehabilitation for those individuals that stray from the path of greatest utility.

This is why slavery is no more, why racism is in decline and why eventually gay rights and green thought will be universal and our struggle to stifle the rights of gays and exploit the planet's resources to the point of our own self-extinction simply will be seen by future historians as sheer ignorance. Leviticus still pops up when people try to brand gays as deviant, even though most it is itself incoherent by today's standards. Remember that "defecating within the camp was unacceptable lest God step in it while walking in the evening." Well, today we just call that sewage management.

Some people, like Richard Dawkins, see infanticide as being the greatest utility. Some believe that to save the planet around 70 percent of the population must be exterminated. Green thought is to value the health of the planet above individual lives; to basically say that human lives are expendable to preserve the collective. This is why abortion is not questionable to many who hold these ideals; because human life isn't that valuable to them. I see many who have green thoughts contrast human beings to cattle or cockroaches. Utility is an insufficient moral standard because it is in the eye of the beholder.

In regards to the Levitical laws, those were given to the Jews and not the world, and for that time and place. God made a covenant with the Jewish people which they agreed to follow. The covenant God made with the world through Christ is different than the Mosaic law, and it makes those older laws irrelevant. If you would like to understand why God would give laws regarding slavery, or homosexuality, I can elucidate further.

In regards to your paraphrasing of Deuteronomy 23:13-14, this is really a classic example of how the scripture can be made to look like it is saying one thing, when it is actually saying something completely different. Did you read this scripture? It does not say that:

Deuteronomy 23:13 And you shall have a trowel with your tools, and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it and turn back and cover up your excrement.

Deuteronomy 23:14 Because the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp, to deliver you and to give up your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy, so that he may not see anything indecent among you and turn away from you.

Gods home on Earth was in the tabernacle, and because God dwelled with His people, He exorted them to keep the camp holy out of reverence for Him.

The rules that God gave for cleanliness were 2500 years ahead of their time:

"In the Bible greater stress was placed upon prevention of disease than was given to the treatment of bodily ailments, and in this no race of people, before or since, has left us such a wealth of LAWS RELATIVE TO HYGIENE AND SANITATION as the Hebrews. These important laws, coming down through the ages, are still used to a marked degree in every country in the world sufficiently enlightened to observe them. One has but to read the book of Leviticus carefully and thoughtfully to conclude that the admonitions of Moses contained therein are, in fact, the groundwork of most of today's sanitary laws. As one closes the book, he must, regardless of his spiritual leanings, feel that the wisdom therein expressed regarding the rules to protect health are superior to any which then existed in the world and that to this day they have been little improved upon" (Magic, Myth and Medicine, Atkinson, p. 20). Dr. D. T. Atkinson

What's interesting about that is that Moses was trained in the knowledge of the Egyptians, the most advanced civilization in the world at that time. Yet you will not find even a shred of it in the bible. Their understanding of medicine at that time led to them doing things like rubbing feces into wounds; ie, it was completely primitive in comparison to the commands that God gave to Moses about cleanliness. Moses didn't know about germs but God did.

Paedophilia will never emerge as acceptable because it violates our basic understanding of human rights and the acceptable age of sexual consent. I know this is a common warning about the "slippery slope of a Godless definition of morality," but it's really a red herring. Do you honestly think society would someday deem that it carries a benefit to society? I just can't see it happening.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_Ancient_Greece

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The straw man argument is that you claim/imply that someone claims that the laws of nature will always be the same, and so forth, then you say that that's not a possible claim to make. But nobody claims any such thing.

I didn't claim or imply anyone did..I was pointing out that Dawkins failed to justify the scientific method because he did not overcome the problem of induction. I then further elucidated the argument by pointing out what the problem of induction is, and why pragmatism could not be justified in light of it.

If the underlying intent behind the question is: "

Listen carefully to what the man is asking and the responses; they're speaking in philosophical terms. The questioner is asking about justification, and Dawkins understood exactly what he meant when he framed the question as "what justifies the faith that science will give us the truth?" This is exactly the intent behind the question. It's a philosophical question, and Dawkins gave an inductive argument as an answer.."it works", but the inductive argument has its own issues which I have already pointed out.

Science has worked incredibly well so far within its domain, so I'm curious why you think there's any reason to even raise the possibility it won't continue to work in the future.

I believe that science will continue to work until the end of time, because there is a God who upholds His lawfully ordered Universe. This isn't really about whether science will work in the future; it's more about the nature and basis for truth claims. Empiricists claim, for instance, that knowledge only comes from sense experience. Empiricism is of course the cornerstone of the scientific method. Because most atheists trust in science to explain the world to them, they are empiricists by default and they think empirical evidence is the measure of everything that is true and real.

In a round about way, this is getting at the core reason for the question. It's cutting to the heart of a major problem that people have, which is that they are only skeptical to a point. They fail to see the assumptions inherent in their own worldview, or that they even have a worldview.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_view

Everyone makes certain assumptions about reality, consciously or unconsciously, in order to function in it. This is something we have discussed before. You think it is unreasonable that you should ever have to justify something like your existence. I happen to agree with you here; it's completely pointless to argue about whether you exist or not. I don't think you should be skeptical of your own existence, and therefore it is justifiable to make that leap. This is an assumption you must make, and there are many more..such as the world is real. That, for instance, the Universe didn't pop into existence 5 seconds ago and all of our memories are false. You must assume that your history is real, and that the people you are meeting are not actors like in the Truman show. All of this sorts out to form the foundations, or basic beliefs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_belief) of your worldview. A world view is like a pair of glasses you put on to interpret reality. My worldview is Christian, for instance..I interpret everything through the revelation of God. Most atheists are naturalists and so their worldview is naturalistic atheism. They interpret everything in natural terms, but this is also informed by their lack of belief in a God. A belief in God or a lack thereof is the cipher which will determine everything you believe about the nature of reality. It is the one truth that informs all other truths.

But here is where things go wrong, and why the question is necessary. People assume things about the nature of reality, and about logic, morality, and science which they cannot justify, and then they falsify truth claims on those topics with reasoning based on those assumptions. For instance, people will say that something isn't real unless there is empirical evidence for it, but this is based on the unjustified assumption that empirical testing is the only method for determining the truth. They will justify this claim like Dawkins justified the scientific method "science works therefore empirical testing". But pointing to the results to justify the assumption is logically fallacious reasoning. I could get out of debt rather quickly by murdering all of my creditors, but if I promoted this to you as a sound debt management plan, would you agree that being debt free justified the assumption inherent in the premise, that murder is acceptable? If you wouldn't, then you can see why no one should agree with the idea that because we sent a man to the moon, the scientific method has been justified. Results don't justify anything; the methodology used to get the results must itself be justified by a higher reasoning process. The idea empirical testing is the only way to obtain truth itself must be empirically tested; and how do you empirically test that idea? This is where the inductive argument completely fails.

Unfortunately for most people their skepticism has already turned off long ago and they are blind to the leaps of logic they make in their own reasoning process. They are only skeptical of what challenges the core assumptions of their worldview, not the assumptions themselves, and they evaluate all truth claims through these assumptions. It would be like if I wore glasses that saw only two colors and you wore glasses that saw three. Everything you told me about seeing three colors I would evaluate in terms of seeing two. I would be utterly blind to the third color because of my assumption that only two were possible. No matter how articulate your argument was, unless you could get me to take off those glasses (put down the assumption that only 2 colors were possible) I would never see it.

So this is the essence of the question..why should we trust science for the truth and not something else? To answer that we must challenge the assumptions that make science possible and see if they are coherent with reality.

I'm not sure what straw man you're seeing in my argument..could you point it out to me?

The question the man asked was how do you justify the scientific method..or, as dawkins said at :38 "how do justify your faith that science will give you the truth"

Here is the essential question: why is there uniformity in nature? Or, why are the laws of nature constant? This is the fundamental assumption that is made in every scientific test, which is that the laws of nature will continue to be constant in the future. Without that assumption science would not be possible.

Dawkins response to his question is pragmatism; it's justified because it works. Well, that doesn't provide any basis for justification. It works now, but why should it work in the future?

What you've appealed to in your reply is probability. You're saying it's more probable that the laws will remain constant because of the vast record we have of unchanging constancy. The problem is that it's still begging the question..what is the reason that probability will tell us what the future will be like? The best you could say is that it always has in the past, but you couldn't tell me why it should continue to do so in the future.

Dawkins did not justify the scientific method in this clip. "It works" is an inductive argument (as Stephen Law affirms at :52) which faces the problem of induction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

It works the last time you checked, but why should it continue to work? To justify it you have to presuppose that the future will be like the past. What is the evidence that the future will be like the past? It's in the past, and thus the presupposition is based upon circular reasoning, a logical fallacy.

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