Suppose, for a moment, you're a strong proponent of Glim, a fantastic new philosophy of ethics that will maximize truth, happiness, and all things good, just as soon as 51% of the population accepts it as the true way; once it has achieved majority status, careful models in game theory show that Glim proponents will be significantly more prosperous and happy than non-proponents (although everybody will benefit on average, according to its models), and it will take over.
Glim has stalled, however; it's stuck at 49% belief, and a new countermovement, antiGlim, has arisen, claiming that Glim is a corrupt moral system with fatal flaws which will destroy the country if it has its way. Belief is starting to creep down, and those who accepted the ideas as plausible but weren't ready to commit are starting to turn away from the movement.
In response, a senior researcher of Glim ethics has written a scathing condemnation of antiGlim as unpatriotic, evil, and determined to keep the populace in a state of perpetual misery to support its own hegemony. He vehemently denies that there are any flaws in the moral system, and refuses to entertain antiGlim in a public debate.
In response to this, belief creeps slightly up, but acceptance goes into a freefall.
You immediately ascertain that the negativity was worse for the movement than the criticisms; you write a response, and are accused of attacking the tone and ignoring the substance of the arguments. Glim and antiGlim leadership proceed into protracted and nasty arguments, until both are highly marginalized, and ignored by the general public. Belief in Glim continues, but when the leaders of antiGlim and Glim finally arrive on a bitterly agreed upon conclusion - the arguments having centered on an actual error in the original formulations of Glim philosophy, they're unable to either get their remaining supports to cooperate, or to get any of the public to listen. Truth, happiness, and all things good never arise, and things get slightly worse, as a result of the error.
Tone arguments are not necessarily logical errors; they may be invoked by those who agree with the substance of an argument who nevertheless may feel that the argument, as posed, is counterproductive to its intended purpose.
I have stopped recommending Dawkin's work to people who are on the fence about religion. The God Delusion utterly destroyed his effectiveness at convincing people against religion. (In a world in which they couldn't do an internet search on his name, it might not matter; we don't live in that world, and I assume other people are as likely to investigate somebody as I am.) It doesn't even matter whether his facts are right or not, the way he presents them will put most people on the intellectual defensive.
If your purpose is to convince people, it's not enough to have good arguments, or good facts; these things can only work if people are receptive to those arguments and those facts. Your first move is your most important - you must try to make that person receptive. And if somebody levels a tone argument at you, your first consideration should not be "Oh! That's DH2, it's a fallacy, I can disregard what this person has to say!" It should be - why are they leveling a tone argument at you to begin with? Are they disagreeing with you on the basis of your tone, or disagreeing with the tone itself?
Or, in short, the categorical assessment of "Responding to Tone" as either a logical fallacy or a poor argument is incorrect, as it starts from an unfounded assumption that the purpose of a tone response is, in fact, to refute the argument. In the few cases I have seen responses to tone which were utilized against an argument, they were in fact ad-hominems, of the formulation "This person clearly hates [x], and thus can't be expected to have an unbiased perspective." Note that this is a particularly persuasive ad-hominem, particularly for somebody who is looking to rationalize their beliefs against an argument - and that this inoculation against argument is precisely the reason you should, in fact, moderate your tone.
I've always regarded the arguments that Luke cites against Dawkins' central argument as being awfully weak.
Yes, theists believe that God is eternal and necessary, a "non-contingent" being, as they say. But you could just as easily say that the universe itself is necessary and non-contingent. It doesn't seem to have existed in its current form forever, but that doesn't mean that the process which gave rise to the Big Bang ever had to be caused by anything, or could possibly have not existed.
Maybe the universe is necessary and non-contingent, maybe not. But the fact that it exists is established beyond reasonable doubt. We're not taking up a big unnecessary complexity burden by positing the existence of the universe. God, on the other hand, is a big complexity burden. You can say that he's non-contingent, that he couldn't possibly not exist, but you could say that about anything, and we don't have any actual evidence for that assertion.
When dealing with a causal chain, you're ultimately going to end up with an infinite regression or an uncaused cause. What Dawkins argues is that if you're going to posit an uncaused cause, God, as an intelligent being, is a far more complex explanation than a simple uncaused cause, such as some sort of basic physical principle.
Some believers will respond that God is simple, he has no moving parts and is ontologically basic. But of course, again, there's no end to the hypothetical entities you could posit and say that they're ontologically basic, but they can't even establish that intelligent ontologically basic entities is a coherent idea, and even if they could, it would leave the question of how we single out their conception of God as the specific ontologically basic causal agent to believe in. He has qualities attributed to him which you could not attribute to an ontologically basic causal entity, so as an explanatory hypothesis he can't be minimally complex.
An actual reply: The question "How did the universe arise?" is equivalent to "How did God arise?". You do not have to explain how the universe came into existence in order to accept that the universe exists, and the same applies to God.
Your main point in your reply is that God fails occam's razor. He does not help us understand the universe nor the physical phenomena; He is just a less embarrassing replacement of the word magic. God has poor explanatory power, and this is a good argument.
If from the beginning you do not accept that God ... (read more)