Yes, you heard me, tomatoes.
I am devastated. My harvest of about three hundred tomatoes has been decimated. Tomato blight. Gutted. The yield would have been my best ever, and they were very healthy looking.
Category Philosophical Argument Against God
The classical theistic components of God, his characteristics of being all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing don’t work very well together. This has been something which I have sought to elucidate over the years, so I thought I would compile a synopsis of where we are at with the idea of OmniGod, and what he has created. These are good arguments, I believe, and I would love to see my readers interact with them, and I would love to see theists of all natures take them to task to see if they stand up. Bookmark this page and return to it, if you will – there’s quite a lot here! I would like to see this as a growing compendium.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off. My segment is always followed by an interesting discussion of ideas brought up by the ‘panel’ of Pauls.
One of my arguments in my God on Trial talk is the argument concerning photosynthesis which I think is a powerful Problem of Evil argument. Basically, when we look at all the suffering in the world, we often forget about the millions and millions of years’ worth of suffering which has taken place on account of carnivorousness.
Some time back I posted an argument on mentalizing deficits with regard to God being unfair. This broadly stated that certain autistic type people who have an inability to empathise are less likely to believe in God, presumably because the intersubjectivity of empathy allows an agent to see the,selves from somebody else’s point of view. This means that they are less able to suppose what God would think about them whilst doing any given moral action, and such like. The abstract, to the paper looked at in the post, reads:
Come along to the newly created Worthing Skeptics in the Pub this Thursday for whom I will be doing a…
Here is a post from James A. Lindsay’s blog, reposted here because I have just edited and published his book through Onus Books. it has had really good reviews and we managed to get Victor Stenger to write a foreword for it:
Quote of the Day from Andy Schueler:
Oh, and I also like the “my mom” argument, which I just made up :-D
This is essentially the point, I believe, which has come out of, or driven, much of the conversation over the last few days between labreuer, Andy Schueler and myself on another thread. We popped down many rabbit holes, including free will, slavery, epistemology, history, the problem of evil and oughts. The conversation was quick and frenetic, so I decided to move it here, and start not afresh but with a streamlined trajectory. Here is what I think was labreuer’s core gist (his own comment):
Some time ago I posted a piece called God Loves Abortion, to which Andy Schueler added a nice piece on conception and the creation of the soul and personhood from a biological perspective. The other day on my Free Will, Heaven and the Problem of Evil video, Honest_John_Law linked this summary by Scott Rhoades of an interesting piece by Gregory Paul.
Here is my talk to the Dorset Humanists given this last week. It was really well received and got great feedback from audience and organisers alike. The video is of good quality though you may need to turn it up to hear some of the questions a little more clearly. The chops are out and looking mighty bushy, so all seems to have gone well.
I am reposting this article as it is relevant to a recent post on Justin Schieber’s non-God objects argument:
So in a recent post I was talking about how God, prior to creation (at least according to classical interpretations of God based on the Ontological Argument), had ontological perfection. That is to say, he was in a perfect state of being (since this is built into the definition of God). The argument followed that, in creating the world, God would be either lacking something and thus having a need, which is incoherent with ontological perfection, or he was downgrading his perfect state in the process of creating this world.
Here is an argument which I have communicated before here and here. Justin Schieber from Reasonable Doubts has worked on this and it has now made it into the Iron Chariots wiki site:
Some think it could be urban legend, but we do think that this actually happened in Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. The Jews, holding a covenant, a legally binding agreement if you will, with God, decide that God has broken the covenant. After all, how can bad things happen to good people; but not any old good people – God’s chosen people? Surely such preference entitles the Jews to a little safer passage along Earth’s historical timeline, though persecution after persecution? The only logical thing to do, it appeared, was to put God on trial for breaking such an agreement.
For your edification and interest: Be there, or be square!
So I was graciously asked by Randal Rauser on his blog recently to provide a synopsis of a few paragraphs to run in his series “Why I am an atheist” (or not a Christian. The series has been interesting and has elicited testimonies from Justin Schieber, Counter Apologist, Jeff Lowder, Ed Babinski and others.
I have since asked Randal to return the favour and he gladly accepted, furnishing me with a much more lengthy expression of the reasons for his Christian belief. But before I create a post on that (probably tomorrow) I thought I would analyse a little what he said about my testimony. Here is what I provided:
It’s time to welcome our first guest post here. The Thinker has occasionally dropped a line and commented on various arguments. He runs his own blog called Atheism & The City, being a secular urbanite living in New York. His philosophically minded blog is worth reading here. His formulation of today’s post can be found here. This post concerns the incompatibilism of God given the truth of evolution. Ie evolutionary theism is problematic. Anyway, over to The Thinker:
Russ chimed in on my Why I Am An Atheist post, in response to Randal Rauser’s request for a paragraph or two on my reasons for my worldview.
Johno, does Rauser think he is going to refute all the “Why I Am An Atheist(or not a Christian)” paragraphs that you and the others wrote?
If he thinks he can do that why does he not just produce evidence which supports his claim that his god exists while it also refutes other’s claims, ancient or contemporary, that their god exists?
Randal Rauser, with whom I have had a radio debate about the Nativity, is running a series on his blog asking atheists why they are atheist (or not Christian). He has asked several atheist bloggers and authors, including myself, to produce a paragraph. Justin Schieber, Counter Apologist and Ed Babinski did a little more than that, so I added a tiny bit extra to mine, but it still remained more concise than theirs! See what you think – it is hard to be super concise:
Two episodes of Skepticule have become available with my counter-apologetics segment, called Pearced Off.
The first episode (44) features my piece on free will as an incoherent gift from God, which can be found here. My segment starts at 29.10.