Reading Time: 7 minutes I know self-promoting has an air of conceit, and I know it’s all ‘blah blah blah’, but for someone in my position, it is a necessary evil. One of my books has just received another great review. Apart from my internet stalker, the ordained father whom I have banned, and who has not read the book, I have unanimous 5 star reviews for The Little Book Of Unholy Questions. Here they are so far:
Philosophical Argument Against God
Posted inPsychology
Autism and belief – autistic people are less likely to believe in God, again (and the mentalizing deficits in men, too)
Reading Time: 4 minutes Recently, I wrote a post which concluded that God was unfair due to not having a level playing field with regard to people having the same access to his love by point of fact that autistic people are less likely to be able to believe in a personal God, as well as men, compared to women, and so on.
Posted inThe Secular
The Outsider Test For Faith
Reading Time: 2 minutes So John Loftus, of Debunking Christianity, and who wrote what is still the finest book deconstructing the Christian position (Why I Became An Atheist whose second edition is now out) has a few books due out soon. I am excited about both, but particularly The Outsider Test For Faith (OTF), based on an argument which he has made his own. The OTF can be summed up as: The only way to rationally test one’s culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use when examining the other religious faiths they reject.
Posted inUncategorized
My counter-apologetics segment to the Skepticule podcast now available
Reading Time: < 1 minute A big thanks to the three Pauls who create the Skepticule podcast and who have granted me a short counter-apologetics segment on their show. The one which I recorded was about perfection, a topic about which I have blogged before. Check it out! My segment starts at 21.54, but check out the whole podcast, too!
Posted inUncategorized
The incompatibilities of God’s perfect nature. Or, he ain’t all that and a bag of chips.
Reading Time: 18 minutes 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.
Posted inUncategorized
Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig Part 3
Reading Time: 4 minutes So, on to the rebuttals. Craig pointed out in several of his rebuttals that Law has not, and did not seem to want to, critique the cosmological argument. Craig does have some beef here as Law seemed to want to debate Craig’s version of God rather than the more fundamental argument over A God’s existence. Thus in true debate point-scoring, Law would take a hit here. However, as Law plainly stated, and I think this was a wise move, this would have broadened the scope too far and wasn’t important for discussing the moral character of Craig’s version of God (thus allowing Law to wedge in his evil God thesis).
What was one of my favourite moments, and it met with a good round of applause from the secularists in the audience (a clear minority), was when Law, whilst talking about his non-answering of Craig’s first (cosmological) argument, declared himself not to be an expert, and to say something like, “I don’t know, I mean I don’t know the answer to the question why the universe exist.”
Posted inUncategorized
Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig Part 2
Reading Time: 3 minutes So, on to Law’s opening statements. It’s probably better to get this from the horse’s mouth -http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2011/10/opening-speech-craig-debate.html. However, I will duly sum up. Law, much to his credit, claimed he was only interested in defending his position using only one argument, based on the Evidential Problem of Evil. That being, if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, then he is able, knows how and is loving enough to want to do something about all the evil in the world. Law went on to talk about some of this evil by pointing out the sheer quantity:
1) all the animal deaths resulting from carnivorousness from the beginning of animal history
2) all the human death, particularly the frequency of child death before the age of five – somewhere between 40% and 60%, historically, of all children born.
Posted inUncategorized
Hell defeated, God creating this world defeated; Bradley vs William Lane Craig
Reading Time: 4 minutes This is taken from an old post of mine. I still find it a real defeater for the concept of hell. I have just listened to Ray Bradley debate William Lane Craig. I heard this several years ago but didn’t really pay it close attention. This time round I was quite shocked at how many […]
Posted inUncategorized
Argument Against a Perfect Being Creating the World
Reading Time: 2 minutes I was listening to a podcast by bloggers Reasonable Doubts recently whereby one of the contributors, Justin Schieber, formulated a logical argument showing the inconsistency of the classic understanding of God, particularly a God who moves from an eternal (a-temporal) existence, to creating time (and space) and living within the framework of such dimensions. This […]