Faith is the deliberate will to believe, in advance of all future evidence and investigation, what one perceives to be either unsupported by evidence or even outright undermined by evidence. In this way faith is essentially a matter of will and not just belief. Simply having a belief that is unsupported or undermined by evidence [...]
There are many wonderful parts of life that billions of people experience through a religious framework, at least partially to their benefit. Spiritual experiences mean a lot to many people and many people interpret their spiritual experience within the symbols, concepts, rituals, metaphysics, and community of their religious group. Rituals enrich people’s lives by giving [...]
Here at Camels With Hammers Eric Steinhart recently accused popular atheism with being guilty of faith in versions of naturalism, materialism, and empiricism on the grounds that their particular positions are “based on weak arguments or no arguments at all”. But believing a position based on a weak argument is not the same thing as believing [...]
I’ve advanced this thesis in some previous posts: every question that used to be answered by appealing to God can be answered better by appealing to some form of evolution. It’s hard for me to understand why that slogan would be a matter of faith. The fact that some thesis is speculative or metaphysical doesn’t [...]
While I agree with Eric Steinhart’s claims that atheists need to take metaphysics seriously and while I would be open to considering evolutionary models for answering metaphysical, ethical, and cosmological questions if they are promising, below I am going to briefly surmise several serious reservations I have to Eric’s suggestions that we ditch the term [...]
Many atheists come to atheism through skepticism. And sometimes that skepticism is radical. It’s hostile to anything that doesn’t meet the alleged standards of our best science. It’s hostile to any theory that is merely speculative. Of course, to be consistent, these radical skeptics ought to apply their skepticism to themselves. If you’re a skeptic, [...]
The Amazing Atheist is one of the greatest comedians of our time, but he hasn’t made it into the mainstream media. He not only trashes a “psychic” in this piece, but he explains what it means to be a reasonable person — and why a reasonable person would not believe in psychics. You can watch [...]
In the comments section of a post I asserted that, “We can say we know induction works to a high degree of certainty.” James Sweet, of No Jesus, No Peas, responds: How do we know that? The only reasons I can come up with rely either on inductive reasoning — circular argument. Remember also that [...]
In a recent post, I wrote the following: Changing people’s minds to make them stop holding positions dogmatically and instead hold them tentatively is still a change of mind one may zealously pursue. On Facebook, Greg writes in reply: I want to address the peculiarity of this statement. One may passionately pursue such a change [...]
In a previous post, I conceded that it was acceptable to call at least some activist atheists like me “evangelical atheists” on some possible senses of the word “evangelical”. Greg wanted to say that this could not be so because all that atheists do (or should) advocate is tentative, skeptical empiricism, and that we do not (or should [...]
Jean Kazez argues that the public square is not the place for atheists to be arguing that science and religion are incompatible. I strongly reject her position on this point because not only do I believe that ordinary people are quite capable of handling a vigorous, no-holds-barred debate about religion but because I believe the [...]
The thoughts of Gregory W. Lester (as edited down by John W. Loftus) (okay, now I feel like calling myself Daniel W. Fincke): Because senses and beliefs are both tools for survival and have evolved to augment one another, our brain considers them to be separate but equally important purveyors of survival information….This means that [...]
Last Christmas Eve, I argued that the belief that God “guided evolution” was not a rationally respectable way to reconcile science with faith but rather it was essentially an effective denial of the theory of natural selection, in its scientifically explanatory sense. Part of the revolutionary character of the discovery of evolution by natural selection [...]
In reply to my defense of what is sometimes called “Evangelical Atheism” on my personal Facebook page, Greg Teed thinks my account comes “so close” to correct but argues that I missed something crucial: All good points, but there is a radical difference *in kind* between what atheists/skeptics promote and what the religious evangelical proselytizes. Sometimes [...]
Last summer there was a cheesy ad for the latest Exorcist film, and the tagline epitomized and exploited a key twist of twisted religious logic. The film’s tagline was “If you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil.” What’s the idea behind this?
In reply to my post, Against Moral Intuitionism, James Gray defended his moral intuitionist leanings against my attacks on them. He starts by quoting me: But many people can be and have been persuaded that goodness is not a property of things but rather of people’s attitudes towards them. The very existence of anti-realists about the existence [...]
In the series of posts I began on Sunday and which has continued through this morning, I have developed and defended my naturalistic approach to understanding value as a realist. James Gray, despite being a moral realist, has balked at much in my attempts to do this and it has become increasingly clear that the [...]
Pete C. argues that because our comprehension is limited, it is hubris for us to rule out faith in things that alleged to go beyond it: I’m not sure where I fall in the spectrum of agnosticism (if i belong there at all) so I can’t really self identify. But I will offer an explanation [...]
Can we morally blame people for failing to pursue the truth well enough or for employing irrational methods of belief formation? Is belief something not in our volitional control at all? Is it an entirely passive thing to “just believe” something? Or even if we have some volitional control over what we believe, does it [...]
Chris Mooney is an accommodationist. In the conflict between science and faith, he is the sort of atheistic science defender who wants to minimize all appearance (and existence) of conflict between religious and scientific ideas because he thinks that vital public policy on matters like climate change hinges on scientists’ abilities to garner trust, cooperation, [...]
A vast majority of believers, though probably not all, believed in God before they ever encountered any arguments for its existence. For obvious cultural and psychological reasons, the concept of God is intuitively understandable and believable for most children and by far most believers start believing in childhood. Even those who spend a short time as [...]
In the past, I have defended the idea that rather than classifying people simply as atheists, agnostics, and theists that we should separate the questions of the contents of beliefs (whether they are atheistic or theistic) from whether one’s atheism or theism is held as a matter of knowledge or not. If one’s theism is [...]
With Sam Harris doing the rounds promoting a utilitarianism that seems to take the pleasures of sentient beings to be the good to be maximized, it’s as appropriate a time as ever to flesh out my objections to prioritizing pleasure and pain as the central goods in life. More specifically, you can read my already [...]
Ophelia Benson counters a common and deeply misleading equivocation (one I counter often, but most specifically addressed here and here): Belief is about truth; it equates to”it is true that X”. It is thus cognitive rather than emotive. It seems odd to me to ask if it would be better to believe the things I [...]
I love how he sums up Aristotle’s notion of practical wisdom, to paraphrase, “practical wisdom is about having a moral will and a moral skill”. The entire talk is a great defense of wisdom, the skill of moral judgment, against cultural overemphases on bureaucratic reliance on rules at the expense of all thinking: Schwartz’s books [...]