It seems to me that there is a sort of 'disconnect' in theist-atheist debates. It is as if the parties to the dispute are not talking about the same thing. Jim Ryan writes,
This is a fairly standard atheist response. Since I picked up the use of 'boilerplate' in philosophical contexts from Jim, I hope he won't be offended if I refer to the quoted passage as atheist boilerplate. It puts me in mind of Russell's Teapot part of the drift of which is that there is no more reason to believe in God than there is to believe that "between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit . . . ."
There are three points that strike me in the above statement by Ryan. First, to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in addition to the objects we normally take to exist. Second, there is no evidence for the God hypothesis. Third, the God hypothesis contradicts what we know to be true. Let me take these in reverse order.
1. I would be interested in hearing from Jim which propositions he thinks we know to be true that entail the nonexistence of God. Could it be the proposition that everything that exists is a material thing? This proposition does entail the nonexistence of God, but we don't know it to be true. And if one simply assumes it to be true, then one quite blatantly begs the question against the theist.
To explain this a bit further, let us adopt a definition of naturalism. I submit that D. M. Armstrong's definition is quite serviceable and captures what many nowadays mean by the term:
It is the contention that the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system. . . . The positive part of the thesis, that the spacetime system exists, is perhaps not very controversial . . . . The negative thesis, that the spacetime system is all there is, is more controversial. (A World of States of Affairs, p. 5)
If we accept Armstrong's definition — and I see no reason not to accept it — and if naturalism so defined is true, then the following do not, and presumably cannot, exist: God as classically conceived, disembodied minds/souls, unexemplified universals, and a whole range of objects variously characterizable as ideal, Platonic, or abstract, including Fregean propositions, Fregean senses in general, numbers, irreducible mathematical sets, and the like. In sum, naturalism is the thesis that reality is exhausted by the space-time system.
Now I hope it is obvious that naturalism as defined is not a proposition of natural science. Nor is it a presupposition of natural science. Natural science studies the spacetime system and what it contains. It does not and cannot study anything outside this system, if there is anything outside it. Nor can natural science pronounce upon the question of whether or not the whole of reality is exhausted by the spacetime system. Of course, there is nothing to stop a physicist or a chemist or a biologist from waxing philosophical and declaring his allegiance to the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism. But he makes a grotesque mistake if he thinks that the results of natural-scientific work entail the truth of naturalism. They neither entail it not entail its negation.
So I am quite puzzled by Ryan's claim that the existence of God is contradicted by much of what we know to be true. I would like him to produce just one proposition that we know to be true that entails the nonexistence of God. The plain truth of the matter, as it seems to me, is that nothing we know to be true rules out the existence of God. I cheerfully concede that nothing we know to be true rules it in either. Pace the doctor angelicus, one cannot rigorously prove the existence of God. One can argue for the existence of God, but not prove the existence of God.
2. Ryan also claims that there is no evidence for the God hypothesis. This strikes me as just plain false. There are all kinds of evidence. That it is not the sort of evidence Ryan and fellow atheists would accept does not show that it is not evidence. People have religious and mystical experiences of many different kinds. There is the 'bite of conscience' that intimates a Reality transcendent of the spacetime world. Some experiences of beauty intimate the same. There are the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God.
The atheist will of course discount all of this. But so what? I will patiently discount all his discountings and show in great detail how none of them are compelling. I will show how he fails to account for obvious facts (consciousness, self-consciouness, conscience, intentionality, purposiveness, etc.) if he assumes that all that exists is in the spacetime world.
3. Ryan seems to think that to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in addition to the objects we normally take to exist. But this is not what a sophisticated theist maintains. God is not at all like Ed Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, the planet Vulcan, or Russell's celestial teapot.
One problem with the teapot and similar analogies is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being. Such a paradimatic being is, as Aquinas appreciated, not just another being among beings, but Being itself, not one more ens but ipsum esse subsistens.
This is connected with the fact that one can argue from very general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.
The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.
People like Ryan, Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not ruled out by anything we know; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.
I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve.
Second, most of the things that we believe to exist we do not believe to exist because of their explanatory power. I believe that you exist, but your existence isn't a particularly better hypothesis than solipsism to describe my inner experiences.
The conceit that our personal ontologies are based on a simple, unique, verifiable, reliable rule is a rationalization. I don't mean that there can be no reasons for what we believe, but there is no single rule such as you imply.
So you are right that religious feeling can be taken as evidence, but it is not the type of evidence that is good for making compelling arguments, especially arguments to a skeptic. Or even to a tentative believer. Indeed, the argument from "personal experience" was thrown at me as an undergrad while I was still a Christian. The Campus Crusade for Christ group came to our dorm to talk to us and said "Look deep in your heart to see what you truly believe about Christ. Do you feel his presence and know that he died for your sins? Don't you believe in your heart that he rose from the dead?" That was their major argument. I did the introspection, and found an extremely strong feeling that I didn't believe it, that this story about some guy coming back from the dead seemed loony. That was what my heart told me. That was a major turning point for me in my slow drift away from theism. Looking back, I see that as a bad reason to stop believing. It was not really reason at all.
You can start to then point out consciousness, mathematical truth, etc as problems for the naturalist. I agree that these are strange for the naturalist, especially consciousness. But that really wouldn't be an argument for theism as much as an argument against naturalism.
Your responses to numbers 1 and 2 sort of get at how I now look at this. You sophisticated theists have an overall worldview that is consistent, elegant, and optimistic. There is no single argument I could give that would destroy this worldview. You can revise things here and there to maintain the general web of belief. On the other hand, sophisticated atheists also have an elegant, consistent, and perhaps less optimistic worldview (at least for the long term!), and there is no knock-down argument against it. The question for me is, which overall sketch painted by each side makes the most sense, given the epistemic raft I find myself on (and we all find ourselves on some raft)?
That isn't to say that argument can't pull people from one to the other worldview. Indeed, I am evidence that it is possible. I shifted, and have helped induce others to shift (as have many Christians who spend so many hours witnessing). But the sophisticated old codgers who are settled on their aircraft carrier (as we age the raft becomes larger and gains inertia) aren't going to shift without some major earthquakes. It is the young, the college students, the people who aren't yet "sophisticated" on which logical arguments will have any major pull.
The problem with theism is that they need to better transition believers from the young and childish Santa Claus theology (and that isn't a major put-down: children don't have the cognitive equipment to understand sophisticated theology) to a more sophisticated and nuanced theology, one that will withstand the pressures of an undergraduate education with all its secular drive. Otherwise, they'll end up lumping theism in with the Easter Bunny, and they'd be right to do so, given the raft they are on.
Your comment reflects how far apart we are. I do in fact hold that we should believe in the existence of a thing iff positing its existence explains something that needs to be explained. You raise two objections to this principle, both of which are weak. First, you object that
But crucially, you fail to explain why this is a problem. You seem to be working under the assumption that a principle of this sort can only be acceptable if its results are immune to revision in light of technological and cultural advances. But why, pray tell, would one accept that?
Second--and here's where things get really bad--you object that "most of the things that we believe to exist we do not believe to exist because of their explanatory power." Here you confuse the actual reasons we have for affirming the existence of things with the sorts of reasons that ought to lead us to believe that such and such things exist. This is like dismissing the cosmological argument for God's existence on the ground that theists don't actually believe in God on the basis of that argument. Clearly that is a mistake.
You add: "I believe that you exist, but your existence isn't a particularly better hypothesis than solipsism to describe my inner experiences." This claim about solipsism being roughly as good an explanation of your experiences is rather tendentious, and therefore stands in need of argument. You can't simply state such a controversial thing and expect to get away with it. But even if you were right, that would establish only this disjunctive conclusion: either my principle is mistaken or your belief in me is unjustified. In inferring that my principle is mistaken, you are assuming without argument that your belief in my existence is justified. But that's not something I'm willing to let you get by with either. So for this point to be cogent, you need to supply two arguments: first, for the claim about solipsism; second, for your belief in my existence being justified.
So you haven't yet provided any good reason to think my principle false or even unreasonable.
I recently blogged on this same issue here and here.
For the second, I note that your own position is a weak form of empiricism and that solipsism is the ultimate empiricism. If you are going to inch out onto the empiricist limb, I believe it is you who owes an explanation of why you go this far and no farther.
It would be interesting to find out what percentage of atheists can recall incidents in their life when they had what they would describe as a sudden irrational urge to believe in God, an urge that they rejected.
You wrote thatBut you also wrote thatThese statements bring a number of questions to mind:
How could God's existence be as evident as anything could possibly be if it is manifested as an irrational urge? One can have irrational urges to do any number of things. Why should the irrational urge to believe in God be privileged over others?
If I were to experience this irrational urge to believe in God, to which God should I direct my belief? Spinoza's God? Allah? The Christian God? The Mormon God? Or will the irrational urge convey the proper choice to me? Do you suppose that Muslims (Mormons, etc.) secretly experience occasional irrational urges to believe in the Christian God?
My own belief is that if there is a God, and if that God wants to make himself known to me (or to other people), he can surely do better than either irrational urges or apologetics.
I don't know that this is true. I do realize that most theists hold that God is immaterial, but is it really essential to the idea of "God" that such a thing be immaterial? I think that your argument really hinges on the idea that God is special -- it's a special kind of thing the existence of which is not subject to the normal rules of evidence or argumentation. That -- that very assertion right there -- is not something you can just matter of factly state as if it needs no defense, indeed, as if it weren't the rather extraordinary assertion that it is. That's a doozy! The celestial tea cup is just saying that we really have no evidence for the existence of this thing, and like anything else that falls into that category, we would then have to at least doubt its existence. Indeed, given this whole business of miracles and how over time false gods have been found out, we would tend to have to reject the very legitimacy, almost, of yet another such claim out of hand. That is the giant tea cup view and it is true that it may well be sufficiently rebutted by "God is a special case," but that assertion, itself, requires intense justification.
And, furthermore, to add to what Eric says about consciousness, etc, it isn't just the case that such examples would only disprove materialism not prove the existence of God, but materialism has well known explanations of these things. I suppose like anything else, such views have their shortcomings, but that doesn't make the equally problematic alternatives suddenly acceptable. And, we certainly don't just leap to "God exists," -- that specific assertion -- just because we had trouble explaining consciousness or moral agency or how there can possibly be mathematical truth. There are explanations for all of these things that don't require God to exist. Indeed, it would be kind of strange if stuff like that did all hinge on God's existence. It's one thing to believe in God, it is another thing to think that if God weren't there holding together mathematics at all times, mathematical truth would just all fall apart somehow. That contradicts the very basis of any philsophy at all, in the first place. We can do philosophy -- we can rationally make sense of it all -- because it stands on its own without a being holding it together for us. We can put it together ourselves, each of us independently of any being.
And, at any rate, I just don't think this is the way to solve such issues in one's own mind. I think we almost immediately have to start asking ourselves some other questions at this stage of the issue of God's existence. What does it mean to exist? What kind of a thing could be God? What does it mean for something to be "material" or "immaterial"? How is existence related to reality? Are they basically sort of the same thing? I think we have to start asking these sorts of questions right away, and I think that a lot of the reason for that comes out of theist declarations -- that "God is love" or that sort of thing and the more general extended defense of theism that has taken place for centuries now. I'm not disparaging theism for that, but I am saying that right off the bat, in this day and age, at least, it is true we do talk about God and other religious objects like they are special. They get special treatment when it comes to whether or not they exist or what they could possibly entail. Instead of just arriving at whatever conclusion reason takes us to, we are choosing our conclusion and finding the most rational basis for drawing it. I know that makes it sound bad, but actually people do this sort of thing all the time, and in the end, it doesn't matter how biased you were if, in fact, it really did end up being the most rational conclusion. So, I am not automatically discounting that sort of thing as fallacious (as it might sound like I am based on the way I am saying all this), but if we are doing that and we know that we are doing it, then we incur something of an extra burden of proof, I think, to account for our bias. And, I think, in this case, by treating religious objects -- God, the soul, etc -- specially this way, we are clearly engaging in apologetics that requires us to at least justify our special treatment of these things. And, I think our very desire to treat these things specially, itself, shows a bias toward a conclusion so that we not only have to have the strongest argument to know that our conclusion is true, but we have to in some measure know that we know it. We have to have some assurance that the argument that justified our pet conclusion didn't just end up being the strongest argument available to us simply because we desired its conclusion.
Your related posts show that we are on the same page. In the first one, you mention religious experience. I think that is crucial. I would add mystical experience and experience of the absoluteness and non-conventionality of some moral distinctions (which is connected with the experience of conscience). I would suggest that a reason atheists do not understand theism is that they simply don't have these sorts of experiences. Nothing in their experience points beyond the human horizon. The notion that there could be something utterly transcendent of matter, man, and his machinations is foreign to them. That notion makes no sense to them, and so, from their point of view, theistic talk has to be reduced to anthropomorphic projection, wish-fulfillment, the need for an opium (Marx) to distract them from their suffering, etc.
David Tye's comment in your other post is also very close to what I'm saying above.
For the record, the Dawkinses and Hitchenses of the world repulse me (in their writings on religion, though not necessarily in their other writings.) There's plenty of bigots amongst us atheists, and I find it infantile. I was as bigoted. At age 14.
As you know, when a philosopher says 'Martian' he means extraterrestrial. He doesn't mean resident of Mars. Residents of the red planet would seem to be excluded by what we know. So I'm pleased to agree with your point: nothing we know rules out ghosts, Martians (= extraterrestrials) or reincarnation.
My main point is that God is in an entirely different category. He is the ground of the being of all this stuff including ghosts if there are any.
You say that all of the arguments for God's existence have, in your view, "failed".
What do you mean by "failed"? If you mean that such arguments are not knock-down proofs of God's existence, then nearly all sophisticated theists will agree with you. On the other hand, if you mean that such arguments are all completely worthless, then that seems to me to be a very dubious position. Surely the idea, for example, that contingent beings need an explanation for their existence is an attractive idea even if not a rationally compelling one. My guess would be that you hold to a position somewhere between those extremes - perhaps you think that the best theistic arguments, individually and collectively, give only weak inductive support. Still, if you grant that much, then you should grant that there's a lot more to be said for God's existence than there is for Russellian teapots and such.
Finally, what well-founded entities would entering God in the crossword puzzle require us to erase? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any.
Absolutely. A material god would have material parts and be subject to dissolution. Nothing like that could count as divine.
I am guilty of no rhetorical jiu jutsu (whatever that is). I simply stated my view, without making any attempt to argue for it. Had you asked me for an argument, I would have tried to provide one, or else I would have admitted that I can't. But that isn't what you did. You offered reasons for thinking my view is false. My response, properly enough, was to point out that your reasons are inadequate for refuting my view on account of the fact that you rely on unsupported, controversial premises. I don't know what rhetorical jiu jutsu is, but that doesn't seem to be it. Surely it isn't the case that the only proper response to your inadequate objections would have been to offer positive reasons for my own position.
You criticize me for "demanding arguments from me when you haven't given any of your own." But again, the difference is that you tried to make arguments and I didn't. I never made any attempt to justify my view or to persuade anyone to accept it. I simply stated it. In contrast, you attempted to persuade me that I am wrong by offering arguments against my view. I then pointed out deficiencies in these arguments. Your reply is that you shouldn't have to rectify these deficiencies; instead, I should have to provide evidence for the view I asserted. But I don't "owe" you any evidence at all. I wasn't trying to argue for my view, or convince anyone of its truth, and so I don't owe anyone any arguments. But you do owe me some defense of your arguments, because in making them you were attempting to show that my view is false. This is a critical difference.
You write: "Once we have agreed that your rule is unreliable, and we have, then the burden is on you to explain why we should give it any credence." But I haven't agreed to that at all. I acknowledged that my rule is fallible. It can lead us to posit things that in the end don't exist, or to deny the existence of things that really do exist. But it is still a generally reliable rule, and by following it, we are slowly but surely converging on the truth. The scientific method, though different, works the same way. It leads us to accept certain scientific theories based on the evidence we have. Sometimes these theories turn out to be false. Does this mean that the scientific method is unreliable? Surely not.
I have no idea why you would characterize my position as a form of empiricism. Empiricism is (roughly) the doctrine that all knowledge comes to us through the senses. The principle I asserted--that we should believe in the existence of a thing iff positing its existence explains something that needs to be explained--in no way implies that all knowledge comes through the senses. My principle could easily lead one to believe in many things that cannot be sensed, such as abstract objects, immaterial souls, or an immaterial God. (It should also be noted that solipsism and empiricism are orthogonal. One could be a rationalist solipsist or an empiricist solipsist.) So the ball is still in your court.
But isn't that just to say that the existence of God is inconsistent with some of the things we know? And thus that some of what we know entails that God does not exist?
It would be nice if you could give us some examples. What would we have to erase from the crossword puzzle if God were to exist?
Are you thinking along the lines of: if God existed, then evil wouldn't exist, but evil does exist, ergo, etc.
If you had put half the energy into an argument as you have put into criticizing my comments, then we might have both learned something.
Imagine me pulling that kind of argument with any other topic. You would skewer me if I argued for universal health care based on the fact that I just experience that it is the right thing to do. It just seems strange that this one topic, the most important topic on the table for the theist, the one for which God could presumably make things a lot easier, ends up in this psychological zone.
Philosophy is all about using reason to question what the mind takes as manifestly true. The manifest image is often wrong. Objects are mostly space, colors do not inhere out in things in the world, etc.. So even things that seem manifestly true are not so. But with religion there is something that doesn't seem manifestly true to me, indeed it seems manifestly false, but having this manifest nugget is necessary to believe. In other words, I'm definitely going to hell if Falwell is right.
Luther believes reason is religion solvent, while experience is its cement (I actually don't know if he believed that, but it's something I picked up and forgot where, I think the reason half might have been at this blog). I think he was not right, as the Jesuits simply kick intellectual ass without mercy. But the line of reasoning in this post is fairly Lutherian.
I think you must mean that while reason, history, and other disciplines point to the truth of theism, ultimately there has to be more, and that something more comes from experience.
I think that your experiences in this domain supervene on a sociocultural historical mileau: it isn't something innate (like color vision). Hence, it is important to question the mileau, to aim reason therein, to find the roots of the experiences. Just accepting the experiences at face value is antiphilosophy. Note I know you aren't saying to do so, and you probably have gone through much doubt and searching and interrogation of these roots, but when people say things like atheists are denying what is manifestly true, that belies ignorance of the contingent nature of such experiences, i.e., an unsophisticated argument from experience.
Perhaps, with religious matters, I'm one of those guys. I just don't feel it. But perhaps you do, in a really strong, undeniable way. Is that what's happening in your psyche? If it were half as strong as some of what I feel walking around a college campus in the spring, then I can understand why you might think I am strange or just in an incommensurate world.
Just trying to understand if this is a good, if not a bit awkward, analogy.
I'm not sure this is entirely true. For instance, listen to Hitchens or Dawkins rail with righteous fury against the supposed evils of religion. They most certainly experience moral distinctions as absolute, and I haven't met an atheist who does otherwise, even if they would pay the opposite view lip service.
I would argue that consciousness itself is a mystical experience, though one that we take for granted since we have it since our first moment of, well, consciousness. The eliminativist is not a zombie. He still has conscious experience, even if he doesn't understand the hard problem, and thus denies it.
In a nutshell, what I think such people lack is not these experiences themselves per se, but rather a certain capacity or tendency for introspection and self-awareness and self-understanding about those experiences.
In any case, I repeat that I don't view my experience as an argument for the existence of God any more than it would be an argument for the existence of a ghost if I could see it and you couldn't. In either case, it is no more reasonable for you to believe that my experience is veridical than it is for you to believe that I am hallucinating. But for my part, I believe that I am not hallucinating.
Your comment didn't offend me, though it was puzzling and, admittedly, somewhat annoying. In my original comment I implicitly endorsed a certain principle, which you then attacked. There was nothing wrong with me replying by directly challenging your criticisms, rather than indirectly challenging them by offering a positive argument for my principle. That is a standard type of reply in philosophy and other intellectual contexts.
Suppose a conversation takes place in a breakroom. The context is a discussion of ethics, and one person (A) says, "God will hold us accountable for what we do, so we should always do our best to be good." Another person (B) jumps in and says, "A, your comment seems to assume the existence of God. This is problematic on two points. First, .... Second, .... The conceit that we should be good because there is a God is a rationalization. I don't mean that there can be no reasons for being good, but there is no God such as you imply." Now suppose that A responds to this comment by pointing out that there are numerous points at which B, in making his objection, assumes things which are controverial without offering any argument for them. B then accuses A of engaging in rhetorical jiu jutsu because A is demanding arguments from B when A hasn't given any of his own. If anything, B says, A owes us arguments for his theism, rather than B owing us a defense of B's objections to theism. After all, since A hasn't provided any arguments for his theism, why should B have to provide any arguments for the controversial assumptions he makes in his objections to theism?
Would you say that in this case, B is right that A has engaged in rhetorical jiu jutsu, and that B need not answer A's objections to his objections because A owes B a positive argument for A's theism?
It seems to me, to the contrary, that it would be quite reasonable for A to defend himself by pointing out that he never purported to be offering any reasons for theism. Instead, he was offering a reason for being good. Had B objected that A's reason for being good assumed something contoversial (i.e., the existence of God), and had B asked A to provide some reason for theism, then A would have needed to provide some such reason, or else admit that the argument he gave for being good shouldn't persuade the non-theist. But in fact B didn't object this way. Instead, he chose to raise certain objections to A's theism. In response, reasonably enough, A chose to defend his theism from objection by defusing B's objections. In all this, I see nothing wrong with what A has done.
I admit that there is a symmetry in our positions, in that I offered a reason for not believing in ghosts, Martians among us, and reincarnation, whereas you offered a reason for not accepting my principle. But the asymmetry, which is key, is that you challenged my principle not by suggesting it was unsupported but by attempting to identify problems with it, whereas I simply attempted to defuse your objections by pointing out that they relied on controversial and unsupported assumptions. That is a key difference.
You suggest that I would have been better served to offer a positive argument for my principle, but even if I had done so, a complete defense of that principle would have called for me to respond to your objections directly. So there is nothing wrong with me doing so.
I have some promising ideas for ways to argue for my principle, but I don't have time to lay them out right now.
Anyway, I found this post very interesting, and indeed ringing true to my experience in discussing issues with certain types of atheists. I've been recently interviewed several times by an atheist for a podcast, and he seems to be a good courteous guy, if not necessarily totally free of this type of rhetoric (listen to the first one here).
In my latest conversation with him, I kept running into what I feel are limitations to the philosophical approach to God. Particularly, it seems we run into difficulty when dealing with the more mystical and storied picture in scripture. I just got finished writing a post on this here:
The Condemnation of Philosophy
I would very much appreciate Dr. Vallicella's (and any other Christian philosopher's) input on the issue I bring up in my essay. Are there any posts in the archives of this blog that address it?
YOu may find something relevant in this category.
You are a kind fellow.
2. Disallowing comments from a particular person, or deleting an offensive, off-topic, or otherwise substandard comment, has nothing to do with censorship. People who think otherwise confuse censorship with lack of sponsorship. I am under an obligation not to interfere with anyone's exercise of legitimate free speech rights. But I am not under any obligation to aid and abet anyone's exercise of free speech rights, legitimate or illegitimate.
3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.