Category Epistemology

Quote of the Day by Ed Babinski

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 2 comments

I am hoping to have Ed Babinski writing the foreword to Beyond an Absence of Faith, an anthology of deconversion accounts. In a private email, Ed wrote this gem:

…it’s sad that many people either avoid reading books based on views they oppose, or they read them and STILL manage to slough off all the questions raised. The mind is a marvelously creative artist when it comes to finding ways to maintain whatever worldview it acquires rather than juggling and shifting between different worldviews all day long, which takes too much mental energy.

Merry Christmas Everybody – it never happened though, and here’s why (and also why we shouldn’t believe anything else about Jesus)…

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 37 comments

Christmas is upon us, the season of joy and merriment, the season, it seems, of massacres reminding us of other massacres. I have a book out called The Nativity: A Critical Examination, which is available from the sidebar over there. As a result of the book’s release this year, I have been doing a number of public talks on the historicity of the Nativity and have even recorded a radio debate with Randal Rauser which should be available any time soon.

Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #5: Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 1 comment

So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions were. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.

Faith vs rational evidence (and David Marshall)

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 64 comments

Here is an old post from DC which John Loftus posted, taken from a then ongoing debate with David Marshall about what faith is. It recently came up in a conversation involving labreuer and David himself. Let me know if it still holds:

David
Part of the problem is that you are extracting these issues from their real world application and in a sense making them irrelevant. Let’s apply the faith vs reason to real life instances:

The Münchhausen trilemma – what grounds a claim?

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 8 comments

I got into a nice little conversation with quality fellow bloggers James East and Counter Apologist today, and we were talking about what grounds our beliefs. I explained that either we had an infinite regress of reasons for claiming something, or there was an axiom (or, indeed, assertion as could be analogised).

The ‘Why I am a Christian’ series – Vincent Torley of Uncommon Descent (Part 3)

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 2 comments

After having looked at Randal Rauser’s reasons for being a Christian, and having had my reasons and his defences intensely debated on his blog, I have in a previous post offered Dr Vincent Torley’s account. Some readers may know Vincent from the Uncommon Descent website which attempts to refute evolution. I have argued with him at length when I used to write for John Loftus more often at Debunking Christianity. Here is his bio:

Jerry Coyne on science (vs religion) for explaining things and being generally useful

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 3 comments

Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True (book and blog), states this insightful piece:

…we justify science rather than faith as a way of finding out stuff not on the basis of first principles, but on the basis of which method actually gives us reliable information about the universe. And by “reliable,” I mean “methods that help us make verified predictions that advance our understanding of the world and produce practical consequences that aren’t possible with other methods”.

The circularity of believing the New Testament

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 168 comments

So here’s the thing. The Christian seems to historiographically rate the NT over and above the other biblical books so that the Gospels have hermeneutic priority over any other book. My last book (The Nativity: A Critical Examination), and my subsequent radio debate with Randal Rauser, showed that the only time the Gospels are verifiable – that they intersect with known facts and verifiable incidents – is during the nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke.

Philosophy 101 – Socrates Factfile

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 6 comments

I’ve been thinking. In doing the philpapers inspired Philosophy 101 series (found here and here, so far), touching on the questions asked in the largest ever survey of philosophers, i thought i would give some nice, basic factfiles explaining what some of the key philosophers have brought to the philosophical table. We hear so much about Aristotle, Plato, Hume and Descartes, but who the hell are they and what did they think (in a really short, easy-to digest manner)?

Supernaturalist double standards

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 83 comments

I was reading a post by Don Severs over on Enough’s Enough entitled (deliberately confusingly, methinks) “Is it wrong to be resistant to opposing Anti-supernaturalism? Or not?”. The post talks about “anti-supernatural bias”, as if atheists reject the claims of the Bible out of presupposition (which can happen) rather than the fact that they are just ridiculous and completely improbable. We can even use objective methodology to arrive at such conclusions (Bayes’s Theorem).

Whether supernatural or not, extraordinary claims DO require extraordinary evidence – a naturalistic parallel to the Gospels

By Andreas Schueler • • 10 comments

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A Jewish preacher being the human incarnation of an all-powerful being, dying on a cross and being resurrected from the dead, is probably one of the most extraordinary claims ever made. But a collection of ancient documents like the Gospels is everything but extraordinary evidence.

In my opinion, documents like the gospels could never be sufficient to establish such an extraordinary claim beyond reasonable doubt. And this has nothing to do with a “bias towards naturalism”. I also don´t believe extraordinary claims which do not violate the laws of nature in any way, simply because an ancient document claims they happened.

Heads You Win, Tails I Lose #1

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 12 comments

When thinking about subjects like the fine-tuning argument it becomes apparent that the theist loves to have their cake and eat it. They thrive off a “heads I win, tails you lose” scenario.

What I mean by this can be exemplified as follows:

In the fine-tuning argument when a skeptic argues:

The universe is more fine-tuned for death than life. The size of the universe is so unbelievably and unnecessarily massive that it appears that it is not designed for human life.

Can we choose what we believe?

By Andreas Schueler • • 44 comments

Isn´t it interesting how the same argument can be very powerful and persuasive for some people while being completely uninteresting for others? The problem of evil is one of the most powerful arguments against the existence of an all-loving God for many Atheists, but I never cared much about it. I´m not sure why, maybe because I never believed in a God anyway, for other reasons, so speculations about what an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God would or would not do always seemed kind of moot to me. But nevertheless, I recently thought about the problem of evil when I had a discussion with our local young earth creationist JohnM.

Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence (in many cases)

By Jonathan MS Pearce • • 65 comments

I get annoyed at apologists and theists that trot “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” out as if it is some kind of unbreakable law. Nonsense. Not only is it the basis of a gazillion court cases, as well as carefully constructed scientific experiments, it is very useful to boot. It CAN be a fallacy when formulated as an Argument from Ignorance, but it is not strictly synonymous. John D. Cook, mathematician and statistician, sums it up well. Also, Carrier in Proving History deals really well with it as not being a fallacy in historical analyses. JohnM has recently being claiming this mantra incorrectly.