I just found these responses of yours to my interactions with Dan Foster. I missed them when they came out months ago because you didn’t tag my name in them. If you want an author to be notified when you write something on Medium, you can write @John Smith (or the author’s name), and then click the link that pops up. The name then turns green.
As for the substance of your commentary, I’m afraid I don’t buy your concern with tone. That looks to me like a red herring to avoid the substance of what I wrote. This second commentary of yours, for example, ignores the fact that in my article which you quote without linking to it, ‘The Feebleness of “Backyard Church’s” Ten Arguments for Theism,’ I go systematically through his ten arguments. I quote him at length, to the point of making my article way too long, so there was no strawmanning of his ten arguments. And the focus was on the arguments, not on Dan Foster, so the ad hominem charge is bogus.
But your reader would have no sense of that from this commentary of yours. Evidently, a critic can systematically expose the weakness of a Christian’s theistic arguments, and a theistic defender can muddy the waters by painting that critic as a meanie. You want critics of Christianity to write about that religion with respect, but you’re assuming exoteric Christianity is respectable. That begs the question, doesn’t it?
As for your reply to the presuppositionalist argument about consciousness, the secular scientists and atheists who worry about that problem are mystified because they’re assuming something like the correspondence theory of truth. They assume that knowledge is impossible unless the mind is what Richard Rorty called a mirror of nature, which would seem to make the mind a miracle. Instead, the mind is a biased, struggling, humanizing power (a perceiver of “phenomena” or affordances in the Kantian and Heideggerian senses). In short, those mainstream secularists aren’t pragmatic enough.
My naturalism is pragmatic, pantheistic, existentialist, and cosmicist, so I have less of a problem with understanding how a monstrous, self-organizing, absurd universe could produce a working brain and mind (by complexification, emergent properties, natural selection, and so on). We might as well wonder how such a universe could produce molecules, stars, and blue skies. All causality is a horrifying mystery without God (given Hume’s problem of induction). And adding God only adds to the mystery and to the horror by adding miracles and the nightmare of a lone supreme being.
For someone who complains so much about my personal attacks, your commentaries here are littered with such attacks and pop diagnoses. Who says I’m trying to “win adherents”? I write because it’s fun and it helps clarify my thinking. If I wanted to attract readers on Medium, wouldn’t I be writing self-help fluff pieces or hackneyed articles on tips for improving folk’s writing? Philosophy and religion are the least attractive topics because they’re among the most challenging.
I’m not going to go through your whole commentary, though. I’ll just thank you for quoting what’s likely the one point in my article that has a typo (which I’ve now fixed), and I’ll suggest that you might be interested in my more recent criticism of Background Church:
