“And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome, when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible. This kind of faith is the perfection of narcissism; God loves me, don’t you know? He cured me of my eczema. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we were giving up hope he found a banker who was willing to give my mother a mortgage.
Category Philosophy of Religion
Last week, I introduced you to John W. Loftus and Randal Rauser’s new debate-style book, God or Godless? I am now going to furnish you with a review. I commend Baker Books for sending me a review copy.
Counter Apologist is a new blogger on the block with a lot of sensible stuff to say. I interviewed him recently and the video is now on You Tube for all to see, embedded here. We talked about his deconversion, heaven, hell and some other stuff. Hope you enjoy it. Please check out his blog, he has a lot of good stuff to say.
Here are some videos of mine outlining the problems with this cornerstone of theology. Let…
The new kid on the counter-apologetic blogging block, the aptly named Counter Apologist, is continuing to produce some great videos. They are really good because they are clean, clear and concise; easy to digest and a good introduction to interesting topics. Here, I/ will embed this particular offering on the meaning of life. Check out his website, which embeds the YT videos alongside a useful transcript of the videos.
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 meant. 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.
People seem to be talking about internet civility an awful lot at the moment. For example, Dan Fincke at Camels with Hammers has been asking people to sign up to a civility pledge. I have been involved in my own debate with a rather infamous apologist, JP Holding. For those who do not know JP Holding, he is an ex-prison librarian cum self-styled apologist who runs Tektonics.org (Tekton Apologetics Ministries) and Theology Web. He has a Masters Degree in Library Science, which will be important for a later point.
If you, like me, were at the Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig debate, your jaw will have dropped when Craig, in defence of God vis-a-vis animal suffering and the problem of evil, claimed that animals don’t suffer pain.
He claimed that most animals didn’t have the conscious awareness of pain that humans and other primates do. He was solely relying on the work of Michael Murray in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. This book sets out that there are, broadly speaking, three levels of pain suffering and related awareness, amoebas in the first, humans in the last, and most higher animals in the middle. They feel pain but are not consciously aware of it in the same way as humans are.
Here is a really useful little paper by Theodore M. Drange on the contradictory aspects of God. Drange is Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University. This article can be found here, at Philo online. This gives a neat little summary of many of the arguments against God based on his characteristics being incompatible with each other. The classic one, as touted by Dan Barker (and myself, often) is that God cannot be perfectly merciful and perfectly just at the same time. See what you think.
William Lane Craig, as we all know, is an apologist with a predilection for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which goes like this:
1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
2) The universe has a beginning of its existence;
C) Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence.
The point I want to make today is about quantum indeterminacy. This is the notion that, at the quantum, microscopic level, things could be indeterminate, or ‘uncaused’. This potentially invalidates the first premise.
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.
So here is an essay that I wrote earlier this year. I am posting it to see what you think,…
This is taken from an old post of mine. I still find it a real defeater for the concept of…
Having looked at the issue of causality in the last post, I would like to continue to analyse the first…
I have, over the years, been a keen objector to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an argument that apologists like William…
I was listening to a podcast by bloggers Reasonable Doubts recently whereby one of the contributors, Justin Schieber, formulated a…
Here is a definition of Ockham’s Razor: Occam’s Razor: the principle that entities should not be multiplied needlessly; the simplest…