Reading Time: 4 minutes In the closing stages of writing my latest book, The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story [UK] (please grab yourself a copy!), I had a few test readers. One was David Austin, down in Australia, who has provided a few guest articles for your delectation. Here is another one – thanks muchly to him (as […]
supernaturalism
Posted inScience
Disputing Miracles vs Disputing History (II)
Reading Time: 4 minutes This comment was left on a thread a few weeks ago: John, why dispute these facts and not go right for the miracles? Because, if miracles are possible, if it’s possible to extract water from a stone and part the sea, then it’s possible that Moses’ mother had a magical pitch pit in her back […]
Posted inUncategorized
Disputing Miracles vs Disputing History (I)
Reading Time: 9 minutes I’m sorry, but I can’t remember who posted this comment but it is worth dwelling on; if I remember correctly, it was in response to me picking apart biblical narratives for their historical inaccuracies and problems, as well as their naturalistic impossibilities: John, why dispute these facts and not go right for the miracles? Because, […]
Posted inUncategorized
Supernaturalism
Reading Time: 3 minutes I posted the other day about motivated reasoning and eric commented as follows: It’s possible to ‘dispassionately argue’ but still be engaging in motivated reasoning. I just don’t think that’s really the case here. What that would look like is: let’s say Jonathan accepted pretty much every non-christian account of an unsubstantiated miracle, but used […]
Posted inHistory
The Resurrection, Fideism and Circularity
Reading Time: 3 minutes The few times that New Testament claims intersect with history – namely, the Nativity accounts, and to a lesser degree, the Resurrection accounts – the claims fail, historically speaking. What epistemic right does the Christian then have for believing in Jesus, for being a Christian? If you ask the Christian “Why do you know that […]
Posted inUncategorized
Carrier’s Definition of Naturalism. I like It.
Reading Time: 3 minutes Being that we are happily debating the definition of naturalism on various threads here, after various posts, I thought I would defer to a post on Richard Carrier’s old old blog (H/T Jim Baerg). I like his definition that I will admittedly decontextualise and paste here because it strips it of a lot of semantic guff […]
Posted inPhilosophy
What Is Naturalism?, and Other Criticisms
Reading Time: 6 minutes The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. – Carl Sagan, Cosmos Jayman, a Thomist who takes his time to argue his case here (and for which I am grateful, because he is a lot more thoughtful and constructive than others) has recently written a short critique of my post discussing […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose, Philosophy
Concerning Metaphysical and Methodological Naturalism
Reading Time: 6 minutes I was having a Tippling Philosophers’ debate concerning naturalism elsewhere and my friend stated this, which is worthy of debate and unpicking: Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a […]
Posted inThe Secular
Best Argument for Theism…?
Reading Time: 4 minutes I am at a stage in my atheistic philosophy where I really don’t think there is any particularly decent argument for theism. The only arguments that have any kind of relevance or traction are arguments from ignorance, where atheism or naturalism has no definite answer, and this allows the possibility for the existence of God. However, […]
Posted inUncategorized
Ghosts, Poltergeists and Religious Belief
Reading Time: 4 minutes I have a friend named Bob who is a devout religious believer. He is also an alcoholic, a conspiracy theory believer and a believer in spirits…ghosts, poltergeists, etc. A nutcase? Possibly, but he is intelligent and articulate, reads a lot (mostly trash novels) and loves to research stuff on the Web, particularly about conspiracies. He […]