cheese it, the cops!

i don't think there are many things that could make me endorse some sort of rigid theocracy, which is not the kind of thing anarchist atheists such as myself endorse. but theocracy can look pretty good in comparison to kleptocracy, especially a kleptocracy propped up by a foreign government, which we are doing all over the region, or the world. i would like to know the amount of the personal fortunes of karzai and zardari and how they came by them. at any rate, the taliban looks better every day when our dudes are simply stripping their countries and depositing the gdp somewhere.

surely the obama admin is regretting that they didn't dump karzai after he won the election fraudulently. and one might point out that we seem to be stuck with these leaders. maybe we are, sort of. but the gap between what we do and what we say we do is astonishing. we seem to love or at least recognize a capitalist, someone always in the business of maximizing his own wealth. but if we do this often enough all over, than that is what we're actually bringing to the poor oppressed people of the world: total exploitation for the sake of greed. like i say, this would make even a perfectly rational person entertain the idea of leaders who at least appear to be incorruptible because they're religious fanatics.

i hope that stephen hawking is better than he's represented as being. and no doubt he is; i guess you can't get joe schmoe, or me for that matter, to understand the physics/mathematics of our pythagorean multiverse etc. maybe he knows something we don't. 

Due to laws like gravity, noted last week's excerpt, Hawking writes that it is entirely possible that the universe "can and will create itself from nothing." That's why we exist. That's why there's something rather than nothing. We don't need God.

now surely he's going to discharge the further obligation to explain why there are these laws rather than others, or no laws, for example. how can the headlines be about hawking's denial that there is a god, when in fact the argument appears to be that no god is necessary in an explanation of the origin of the universe? these things matter in the terms of the ancient argument.

at any rate, maybe theism/atheism turns partly on aesthetic sensibilities. there can be beauty in a city that grows up willy-nilly chaotically over time as well as of an area designed from whole cloth, a planned environment. the willy-nilly city may of course also be in principle explicable: well there are economic and political histories and so on. but it teems, is wildly profligate, always just barely eluding your explanatory machinery.

kathleen parker is right that there's twelve-step stuff behind beck, including a basic stance of kind of desperation for god's help. but there are also many ways and reasons that what beck is doing is bad 12-step practice, however excellent it may be in other directions, or not. one thing to say: twelve-step programs have no leaders, no one who owns the ideology. the principle of anonymity means that aa, e.g. has no spokespersons, and they constantly emphasize "principles, not personalities." i do think beck presents himself in many ways that are immediately incompatible with 12-step practice. 

parker by the end says that 12-step programs proselytize, or are "evangelical." i'd say this is a complete misunderstanding. the twelfth step inculcates "carrying the message to the alcoholic that still suffers." and helping others recover is presented as an essential dimension of one's own recovery. but this means one at a time, helping particular people who need and want help find help by sharing your story. it has absolutely nothing to do with ranting for hours on national television, or getting up on the steps of the lincoln memorial and gesticulating. at the heart of the program is a severe and serious cultivation of humility. i'm not sure that beck's declarations of his own humility are entirely sincere

glenn beck, let's say, is the opposite of bill w., who didn't even want to give his name, who never presented himself in public as a leader or spokesman: there are no leaders or spokesmen. i was perfectly serious when i said that it's likely that beck's twelve-step sponsor basically thinks that all he's doing is courting a relapse. well, we'll survive glenn beck's relapse, and twelve-step programs have a survived a thousand distortions/appropriations by a thousand egomaniacs, a thousand attempts to profit or to promote oneself.

Tradition Eleven—Our public relations policy is based on attraction rather than promotion; we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.
Trad Twelve—Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our Traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities

Beck made the remarks in answer to a question about his previous accusation that Obama was a "racist" who has "a deep-seated hatred for white people." He contended that that statement "was not accurate" and that he had "miscast" Obama's religious beliefs as racism.

i swear i am not obsessed with glenn beck, and i will soon leave this zone entirely. but i would think perhaps some of the people who have pulled that quote out every three columns for a year would acknowledge this retraction. according to morning edition this am, beck has asserted that obama's theology is neither christian nor muslim. steve innskeep's remark: he provided no evidence for that. it's like beck was putting forth some birther-type theory. well, his argument is that christianity (and i guess islam, according to beck) preaches individual not collective salvation. he holds that the latter is an innovation and is incompatible with the main thrust of christian teachings.

now this is a remarkable critique that engages the whole history of individualism and collectivism, reaching to the heart of many political debates over the last 250 years. i imagine that proponents of collective salvation within christianity have a whole theological framework; i bet the debate is incredibly rich and complicated. but you know beck has actually been trying to do the history too, and he appeals to a certain vision of protestantism, one that among others we ought to associate with kierkegaard and emerson, figures to whose philosophy, putting it mildly, i am attracted.

but really we have quite a rich, fundamental, historically-oriented critique of obama's politics by way of his spirituality. just dismissing it as wacky birther paranoia is...not an adequate or honest actual response. it would be bizarre and amazing to see actual individualism (as opposed merely to self-seeking etc) arise again as a viable option, theologically or politically.

on the other hand, "politicizing" science is inevitable, and obviously actual science does not directly draw policy conclusions. you sort of get the vague feeling that we could actually be ruled by scientifically discovered facts, or by dudes down in a laboratory somewhere. but ask yourself whether that makes any sense or, even if it did, whether that's something you want. that the earth is getting warmer does not itself dictate any given policy, obviously. science can bear on policy, of course. but i would strongly advise you to stare directly at the history of science for awhile before you just, for example, embrace the equation of science and truth. the nazis had a science of racial differences, for example, but that already had a hundred-year history, and stood at the origin of anthropology. science takes place in a social and political and physical context, and you had better start thinking about who's funding what and why.

really it's funny that the public/political cult of science - its ever-growing pop prestige as the only outlet of truth - has been accompanied by actual work showing the way scientific truths are produced within power structures: foucault's, for example (esp with regard to the social sciences as handmaidens of subordination) and latour's (in the phsyical sciences).

but any way you look at it, science - even if it were the only source of objective truth - does not itself, or should not itself, articulate values or make policy decisions in a democracy. and really what this is all about is annexingthe epistemic prestige of science for whatever program you want to push, like evangelicals annexing the bible in the same way: as the only origin of truths. the cult of science is profoundly hierarchical, corresponding to a technocratic model of governance through expertise, which means: we want power. 

what you need to see is that there are many and varied sources of knowledge and value. high-school dropouts have access to truths no ph.d. has ever clearly contemplated.

i'll be damned! or perhaps not, after all.

let me ask you this: are there any circumstances in which the oil spill would be, roughly, nobody's fault? or is that by definition impossible? what if, you know, they hit a sudden, you know, methane pocket or something that they could not have known was there? or something? or if there was just a bizarre concatenation of extremely unlikely events? what i would say is: you've got to look and see whether anyone was at fault, and if so why and to what extent. but the "it's a fucked-up world" move has to be one of the possibilities. i think rand paul is right, that is, that the whole idea is that we have to hang somebody. we still live for the anthropomorphic explanation: that it has to come back to somebody's greed and evil, who can then be punished; this is just to say that we can't face an amoral material universe. katrina was a beautiful example: it was going to have to turn out to be someone's fault: brownies's, the corps of engineers, the forces of global warming.

now one reason it has to turn out to be someone's fault is that someone has to pay; i mean literally someone's got to pony up the billions. but the impulse is more powerful than that. and working backwards from the disaster, it's going to be extremely easy to see some things that should have been done differently, even if at every moment of not doing things differently, the people involved made sound decisions relative to the information at their disposal, or made the decisions you would have made in their place, etc.

notice i am not saying that no one is at fault. i'm saying that as you do the investigations, that's more or less one of the possibilities. face up. and realize that burning people at the stake will not really expiate their sins or our sins or make the world make moral sense.

well, it's kind of interesting that the supreme court is dominated by catholics and jews. i guess those are legalistic traditions - canon law and the whole idea of torah - whereas even though there's plenty of protestant law and legalism, there is also a suspicion of law within the radical protestant tradition. blah blah blah immigrants' kids go to law school. at least there are no black people or women on the court.

one thing you're going to see in the gulf spill is that it will turn out to be the government's fault. it will bring the governorship of bobby jindal or perhaps even the presidency of barack obama to a crashing halt. this is the actually interesting purpose of government, of erecting over ourselves a gigantic human power. it makes the world comprehensible as an arena of human responsibility, so that no matter what happens you have someone to burn at the stake. the paradigm is katrina, where bush's lack of global warming initiatives gave rise to the hurricane etc, etc. or the financial crisis: a regulatory failure. who to blame for the weather has been a really difficult question for some time, but statism has put it to rest. that is, when you reach a certain pitch of real state power combined with a kind of imagination of omnipotence you finally get a comprehensible universe, a purposive universe, a universe that is potentially a just universe, though it continually fails.

that's why "mistrust of government" is always growing: well, one should always mistrust flighty pagan gods of one's own invention, even as one propitiates them with blood sacrifice. but really if you trusted government at this point you'd be trusting it to make you immune from the world, from sickness and poverty, terror and depression, crime and arbitrary disaster: in short, you could trust government only if it made you entirely invulnerable to pain and death. and you expect it to. and it promises to. and in its ridiculous reality as a bunch of human beings it always necessarily fails.

so if you're looking for a solution to the papacy, i suggest sending in dr. dre: "we've got your motherfucking compound surrounded. put down the candy and let the little boy go. know what i'm sayin?" i realize that sending in dre is extreme. but he's already your real pope. if you didn't want to see dre, you shoulda listened to martin luther when you had the chance, beeahtch.



this song also contains the classic blast "when you diss dre, you diss yourself." straight outta kindergarten!

in all the coverage of the pederast priests, one question appears to be unaskable: why are so many priests into this? you know 'what do we do about this problem?' is one question. the other is: how did we get the point where you have hundreds (at least) of priests abusing thousands of boys in all the corners of the globe? is this supposed to be a coincidence or something? because it sounds to me more like a widespread well-known tolerated or encouraged practice, something one knows one is getting into as one heads into one's career or something. i don't know about you, but i can't look at a roman catholic priest without wondering. and that would include the whole hierarchy. you know you look at the pope and worry about the cover-up etc. but you also look at the pope and wonder about his...history of sexual expression.

sometimes with regard to the catholic priests/altarboys it's said that, you know, the frequency of pederasty among the priesthood is probably similar to that of the general population. um. horseshit. it seems to be everywhere, all the time. one would have to think that really there was an informal practice what we call child sexual abuse in the church: that this was a conventional practice, perhaps even to be encouraged as an aid to...celibacy, especially as a screaming misogynist might understand it: the real degradation is to touch a woman. i bet there are documents of this, going back centuries, only you can't subpoena the vatican, you know?

then again, as i've said many times, you can see that someone who views their own sexuality as horrendously sinful - especially self-loathing gay men in societies of extreme homophobia - would want to make a vow of celibacy. and then of course like most of us when we swear off sex such people are not able to keep that vow. now sex with boys might actually be proposed as a necessary outlet, a way to keep people in the priesthood.

i would say that if you haven't learned this lesson before now, you should let this teach you to stop being a catholic. or anyway be one only in the very attenuated sense in which you repudiate the authority of the human hierarchy of the church entirely. now that you can't exactly be a catholic and do that should teach you something...

well i did rag on obama for not meeting with the dalai lama last fall. so i express my approval that he did so today.

the pat robertson stuff is of course wacky. but it's also kind of touching. it's one way through this process in which i think we are all engaged at some level: trying to make this kind of shit make sense. it's a challenge, putting it mildly, to any religion that makes the world the product of a benevolent god. one factor in the growing religious skepticism in 18th century europe was a similar disaster in lisbon. the main thrust of many explanations comes back to making the disasters in some sense the product of human agency or choice or evil or greed and so on. then we would be immune to catastrophe if we were good people or if we believed the right things.

now in my view reality is fundamentallly incomprehensible and morally arbitrary. but like anyone else i have a hell of a time facing up. and it strikes me that the robertson thing - which implicitly makes haitian catholicism/voodoo satanism, and supports colonialism, racism etc - is self-serving and ridiculous. but...it is poignant, human, and it exposes our basic dilemma.

michael gerson is a pretty excellent columnist and thinker. and that defense of brit hume on tiger woods seems basically right to me.

here's an interesting piece by russ douthat on popular pantheism. very true. but one thing i would point out is that pantheism of the sort he's describing is a lot more like the standard religions than douthat or its acolytes would allow, because fundamentally nature is treated as an agent: it tries to achieve an equilibrium; it wants balance; and it wants your worship or connection. our distance from it is like - in fact is - the distance of a sinner from his god. i like the idea better than i like the idea of a transcendent spiritual intelligence, for one thing because that conception can't even be made out: it is nonsensical or contradictory. but on the other hand the modern pantheist hasn't achieved immanence in the object of her worship either, hasn't at all seen that nature is a morally arbitrary system by our standards, that it's not trying to get anywhere, etc. "it's nature's way of telling you something's wrong": it might as well be a scripture: nature as a text, and as the author of a text.

douthat's conclusion - that we are half-animals and half-not, that we are moral creatures and hence not merely natural - is the traditional monotheistic view. here it is used in a really compelling critique of pantheism: that is some of the best philosophical writing i've ever seen in an op-ed column. but i must say that the modern pantheist thinks exactly the same thing in slightly transposed terms: that we stand partly outside the order of nature - which we can harm or nurture - and have to engage in a process to reconnect with it. this sort of pantheism just is a monotheism, perhaps a competitor with judaism, islam, christianity, but also, like each of those in relation to the others, part of the same history.

in fact, you can see it emerging in the same history, together with the emergence of the reformation and modern science. spinoza is obviously a site, and he's trying to show that that treating nature as god is not heretical, is entailed by judaism and christianity. or you get emerson's development from unitarian minister to pantheist minister, which is a far less profound change than it might appear to be. i put thoreau in aslightly different category: his nature is more equivocal and less conscious. but he has been read as a pantheist pope.

now we do have examples of consciousness and goal-directed behavior emerging from material systems: namely in ourselves and each other. so it could be that the universe as a whole is like a giant brain from which consciousness could emerge. however do you really believe that? and why? you're anthropomorphizing the whole kit and caboodle: saying the universe is made in our image or vice versa. also i would point out that consciousness emerges in organisms in an environment, that consciousness is consciousnes of something outside ourselves, is a form of alertness or sensitivity to a world. but what would the world be consious of? itself i suppose: a kind of onanistic god.

at any rate, the structure, while not quite as unbelievable as the traditoonal monotheisms, is unbelievable, or is fundamentally a matter of sheer faith, and is also bent to whatever our purposes might be: it's as it were political rather than an attempt to ascertain the truth.

that france bans the headscarf, or britain the burqa etc, shows they are secular societies, universal and tolerant societies that have overcome religious divisions. that switzerland bans the minaret is "the latest sign of a backlash against muslim immigrants." the fact that secularism and universal tolerance is indistinguishable on the ground from bigotry and intolerance might give one pause, if one paused. one thing that the forces of progress and the forces of reaction have massively in common: they assert that they themselves can legitimately tell people what to wear or how to build. that is, they are statists. that is, they are embroiled in massive impostures, delusions, fallacies, fantasies, and contradictions that they are incapable actually of seeing or thinking through, god bless their little hearts.

mr fun writes, re: me on eboo patel:

now while this piece is dishonest, it is also combatting an American narrative that concludes with American interference in the Middle East, since (we all know) that is where Muslim terrorists come from. now the piece is dishonest, but the case you make for the truth here is and has been used as the kernel of American entire foreign policy for the past 8+ years.

well that's true, isn't it. and serracho says "chicken and egg': a good question, as the washpost makes clear today: they hated and ridiculed him and keyed his car down there because he was a conspicuous muslim. but on the other hand, even in the midst of disasters military and otherwise (for example, the destruction of tibet), i don't think you've seen, for example, buddhist suicide bombers or random mass murderers. for that matter, precious few shiite muslims or even christians, though you get the occasional eric rudolph. but adherents of sunni islam seem to do this every single day in many different locations. you want to call that a coincidence?

of course, most sunni muslims don't fly planes into buildings etc., and i'm sure many are peace-loving sweeties with love in their hearts. but on the other hand, when the next person shrapnelizes a woman's market or girls' school someplace, are you going to be in any doubt about their religious affiliation, or about the kind of thing they would say in justification of their own acts?

i might say the problem with this particular style or approach to violence is that it is anti-tactical, bizarrely irrelevant. your tibetan monk might be in despair. might be oppressed. but he's not going to start blowing people up at absolute random; that bears no relation to his despair. all over the world, people are in grinding poverty, despair, pain. they are devalued and exploited by the west or by christians or by commies or kleptocrats, etc. it would not be strange or even perhaps wrong to respond violently. but simply to start shooting or exploding or immolating people selected at random would not appear to have any possible moral justifcation or any fucking use. there is some peculiar ideology at work that detaches the act from its causes or effects in a fundamentally ahuman or alien/alienated way. so, um, where does that ideology come from? because it appears to me to be pretty unusual in human history.

so people do a lot of wrong things. "the west" does a lot of wrong things. it will lob a missile from a predator drone into your wedding, which looks like terrorism. and the evil of such things needs to be described and exposed bit by bit. but the logic is, for all that, utterly different: comprehensible even if wrong etc. both acts might be evil, even equally evil, but they are evil in fundamentally different ways. one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter is just wrong. no one is a freedom fighter in virtue of killing whoever happens to be present, victimizing people without any connection to a cause or comprehensible strategy for pushing it forward. i say that terrorism is real and well beyond stupid, and i say that 90% of it proceeds from sunni islam. that might be wrong and dangerous to say. is it false?

suicide bomb in pakistan kills 12: The morning attack took place in the town of Adazai, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the main northwest city of Peshawar. The market was crowded with shoppers and goats being sold to celebrate the upcoming Muslim festival of Eid.

this, by now, is mechanical, not only for muslims but for non-muslims, and if truth was pragmatic or merely strategic, the idea that acts of violence or terrorism have nothing to do with islam would be...true. now let me say, there are many varieties of islam. you're not going to find sufi saints in suicide vests. not only that, but of course there are christian fanatics, and there are people who go on shooting rampages for non-religious reasons or for no comprehensible reason whatsoever, which is really the position on something like this: any explanation - including religious fanaticism - is inadequate because the effect is both infinitely in excess to and virtually completely conceptually detached, arbitrary, in relation to the cause.

but if like eboo patel you find yourself explaining away act after act day after day as a misunderstanding or having nothing to do with what the people doing these acts say they are doing, i think you are being disingenuous, or perhaps believing what you need to believe in the teeth of what's true. if you keep quoting the peace-loving passages of the koran and ignoring the justifications or celebrations of violence in the text or the extremely violent early history of islam - its teaching that the infidel deserves death and its history of giving people what it says they deserve, i don't think you're being honest.

at any rate, i don't feel the necessity to pretend to believe what, if it were true, would make the world a little better. and indeed, if you know that you're doing that, you don't actually believe what you say you believe: believing p is taking p to be true, not taking it to help us all live as brothers.

i might admire you for being good, but if i think that the reasons you're urging me to believe that p have nothing to do with whether p is true, by definition it's not possible to find what you're saying convincing. you (the politician, pundit, or just schmoe) say that p because it would help to believe p or it would be admirable to believe that p or we would all feel better if we believed that p or if we all beieved that p the world would be cured or something. you say it and i nod along for reasons that have nothing to do whether what we're saying is true. you talk, i nod, and neither us believe at all. (the graduation address: "anything you can dream, you can accomplish." no one denies it, and no one believes it.) now i think we pay a huge price for that ultimately; i don't believe it really is a long-term solution to anything or that it really usually has good effects. it's just living in a cooperative fantasy or a tissue of lies. but of course by my own lights whether it does or does not have good effects cannot be the question.

watching the kennedy memorial reminds us all again how full of funkiness catholicism really is. the vestments, the eucharist, all those golden goblets, images everywhere. that is some wild shit!

new frontiers in statecraft and the rule of law:

China has already positioned itself in other ways, including enacting a law in 2007 that says all reincarnations...must be approved by the government.

badass religion.

handout from my philosophy of religion class, also on the handouts page.

Basic Arguments for God's Existence

Each of these basic strategies supports numerous formulations, and there are other strategies as well.

The Ontological Argument (Anselm, e.g.)
The term 'God' refers to the greatest possible being.
A being which exists is greater than a being which does not exist.
Therefore, God exists.

(The ontological argument is a priori, deductive, and has the advantage not only of proving (if it proves anything) that God is morally perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, and so on.)

The Cosmological Argument (Aquinas etc)
Version (a): First Cause
Every motion, event, or object must have a cause.
There cannot be a temporally infinite chain of causation.
Therefore, there must be a first cause that is not itself caused by anything else ("and this all people call God.")

Version (b): from the principle of sufficient reason
For every event and object, there is in principle an adequate reason or explanation.
This is true not only of each specific thing and event but of the whole series or array.
Therefore there must be something in terms of which the whole universe or causal sequence can be explained (say, "the will of God")

(The cosmological argument is a posteriori in the sense that it supposes (from experience) that there things, events, and so on. But it is usually framed deductively.)

The Teleological Argument or The Argument from Design
The universe displays such elements of physical or moral order or purpose that it would be irrational to believe that it was the result of chance rather than intentional design.
This is often framed as an argument from analogy: say we found a watch on the beach; we'd conclude it was the result of someone's purposeful design and manufacture. How much more elaborate and beautiful etc is the world!

(The teleological argument is a posteriori and inductive or abductive.)

Definitions
a priori knowledge is knowledge that is not based on sensory (empirical) observation. Examples include principles of mathematics and logic.
a posteriori knowledge is emprical knowledge, knowledge based on sensory experience.
deductive arguments are arguments in which it is supposed that if the premises are true, the conclusion cannot be rationally denied. E.g. All men are mortal. Fred is a man. Therefore, Fred is mortal.
inductive arguments rest on enumerating observations. For example, all the crows we have observed are black. Therefore, the next crow we observe will be black. Though the premise lends probability to the conclusion, the premise(s) could be true and the conclusion false.

abductive arguments are arguments from analogy, concluding from the fact that two items are similar in certain respects, they are similar in other respects. For example, since rats are like people (in some respects), if a substance cures cancer in rats, it is likely to cure cancer in people.

here's an essay setting out faith-based atheism.

you know i hate to say it, but the pro-choice arguments of religious liberals like john kerry and barack obama are merely incoherent. i saw tim kaine on the tube the other day taking this (typical) line. 'well, you know, my religion teaches that human life is sacred and begins at conception."personally," i agree.  but i'm not willing to impose these views on women who are making hard decisions.' um. ok. so i believe it's murder, but i'm not willing to prohibit murder? or i don't operate according to my own beliefs, but according to someone else's beliefs (i.e. i believe and fail to believe it simultaneously)? or what? barack's view is that "women don't make these decisions lightly.' well, murderers often don't make their decision to kill your sorry ass lightly. does that mean murder shouldn't be against the law, or shouldn't be if it's not taken lightly? get busy trying to make the position actually consistent. like: my religion teaches that life begins at conception, but i disagree. or: my religion teaches that life is sacred, but i think life stinks. or: you know: i really don't know when life begins, despite what my religion may say, so i don't know whether it's deeply wrong to abort a fetus or not. until i'm more certain, i'm not advocating a ban. or something, anything, that makes some sort of rudimentary sense. certainly i'm not willing to swallow this  'what i believe personally has nothing to do with what i believe politically' idea or something. i believe x in my capacity as a y, and totally repudiate it in my capacity as a z. um, whatever. or: as an actual human being i believe x, but as a spectral somethingorother i disagree with myself. or: as a z i repudiate my own most deeply-held convictions. er, good luck with that, you fucking hypocrite.

see this is the same problem. we like any argument whose conclusions we support. we're happy that we've got a pro-choice pres, or whatever, so we just ignore the obvious ridiculous contradictions, all the hemming and hawing, the senseless slop. maybe that's the best we can do in the context of electoral politics. but surely people like kaine and obama (unlike kerry, perhaps) are aware of the fact that they're just spouting crap? can obama really just flatly contradict himself in the course of two sentences, or develop an inyourface incoherent position, and be completely unaware of that fact? and if he's aware of it, couldn't he do better somehow?

i realize there's a political dilemma. if i don't believe wholeheartedly everything that "my religion" teaches, then i'm sort of a kind of agnostic, and thus disqualified from the presidency. but if i do believe it, then i'm pro-life, alienating my own constituency. but maybe there's room for just a touch of honest groping or something?

the atheism videos have been arranged in a playlist.

seventh and last: on intelligent design in the schools.

sixth in the unreasonable atheism series. this is the central item, actually setting forth my version of atheism.

fourth in the series: the argument from design.

third atheist video: the a priori arguments.