How can we go about persuading better in debates about religious beliefs? ProfMTH develops and, in some cases, rightfully disagrees with ideas from Jennifer Faust: Your Thoughts?
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Category Archives: Arguments for the Existence of God
“The Shifting Sands of Evidence & Argument” (Why Religious Arguments Fail to Persuade)
July 10, 2010 – 4:09 pmOn God As The Source Of Being But Not Of Evil
July 9, 2010 – 11:15 amIntroduction This post is a long one but an important one for understanding what sophisticated Roman Catholic philosophers have traditionally meant when they have said that “God is good” and that the existence of evil is not to be taken as counter-evidence to their belief in God’s goodness. Very often we atheists are dismissed as [...]
The Cosmological Argument, The Composition Fallacy, And More Reasons Not To Believe In God
July 3, 2010 – 4:29 pmShane Wilkins, a graduate student in philosophy at Fordham (where we were fellow students and colleagues until just recently), has been an invaluable regular commentator at Camels With Hammers. He has served as my primary theistic foil since the beginning, when our 7-part debate (which started with my post Objections to Religious Moderates and Intellecuals 1) propelled this [...]
6 Basic Kinds Of Answer To The Question “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
July 1, 2010 – 5:58 pmWhy is there something rather than nothing? This question includes God in its scope: if there is a God, then God is something, so we can always ask: why is there God rather than no God? This implies that the question cannot be answered by appealing to God. It can’t be answered by saying: because [...]
Beyond Agnosticism: More Details About How I Know Various Kinds Of Gods Do Not Exist, Based On Scientific And Philosophical Reasons
June 30, 2010 – 11:41 amWhile I agree with, and vigorously defend, the notion that there is an important difference between lacking a belief in gods (as an agnostic atheist) and believing there are no gods (as a gnostic atheist), I also think that atheists should not, based on the best available scientific evidence and philosophical arguments, merely lack belief [...]
No, I’m Not An Atheist By Faith, Here Are My Arguments.
June 29, 2010 – 10:46 amYesterday Ron Rosenbaum aggressively attacked atheism and defended agnosticism in Slate. He starts out with the familiar charge that atheists have “faith”. But faith in what? Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the [...]
Rejecting The Question, “Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?”
June 28, 2010 – 7:26 pmPZ Myers calls attention today to a post from Sean Carroll from a couple of years ago, which reminds me in part of some of my own thinking about the confusion in the question of “why there is something rather than nothing?”. I had a Thomist philosophy professor who impressed upon me that for Aquinas [...]
Christopher Hitchens Vs. Laura Ingraham & Doug Wilson
June 20, 2010 – 9:08 pmThey start talking after an opening minute of some Gospel Bob Dylan: Your Thoughts?
The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker
June 20, 2010 – 5:55 pmStrictly deriving belief in the Christian God logically from the problem of where everything comes from: It’s amazing how the problem of how something comes from nothing leads to so many obvious and unavoidable truths, isn’t it? Your Thoughts?
Are Divine Command Theory And Objective Morality Mutually Exclusive Concepts?
June 9, 2010 – 11:32 pmLuke Muelhauser confronts William Lane Craig with the inconsistency between his divine command interpretation of morality, according to which things are moral or immoral as solely determined by God’s calling them as such, on the one hand, and his insistence that in this way God is the source of “objective morality”: But let us say [...]
Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist
June 7, 2010 – 5:44 pmYesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods). Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant [...]
The Evil God Hypothesis
May 17, 2010 – 5:26 pmStephen Law has recently published an article in Religious Studies showing how many of the arguments used in theodicy (meaning, in attempts to prove that there is a good God, despite the existence of evil) could equally well be employed to prove that there is an evil God. Listen to Law explain and defend the [...]
Mr. Deity Tries To Find Time To Make Time
February 8, 2010 – 11:01 pmI don’t know if I’ve seen such a well-scripted bit of comdy about metaphysics and cosmology before: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ujpzdeolA&hl=en_US&fs=1&] Your Thoughts?
On Rejecting Atheism Because You Don’t Like Atheists
January 5, 2010 – 8:37 pmChris begins an otherwise interesting reply to my post on Jon Stewart’s views on religion with this puzzling remark: Well I agree with Stewart’s statement to a degree, you can be a good person without faith, I know several aethists who are not the sterotypical ahole. I guess this comment is more of a bouncing off [...]
The Yearning Animal
September 21, 2009 – 3:59 pmGreta Christina takes down the argument that the desire for God proves there is a God to fulfill it out there to be discovered: Someone (I can’t remember who now) recently pointed out that the “no atheists in foxholes” argument, even if it were true (which it’s not), isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s actually [...]
On Comparing God To The Tooth Fairy
September 18, 2009 – 2:29 amAs I argued to Clergy Guy recently, there is a qualitative difference between talking about the possible scientific/metaphysical principle of a ground of all being defensibly called “God” and talking about one of the personal deities of historical religions who are claimed to engage with each other and with humanity in highly specified ways by [...]
Qualia Soup On Faith and William Lane Craig Arguments For God’s Existence
September 16, 2009 – 8:40 amQualia Soup’s first new video in months (and it’s terrific as usual). He takes apart entirely the notion that we can have knowledge of anything supernatural. Your Thoughts?
Definitions, Maths, Big Bang, and Fables
September 7, 2009 – 12:12 pmSome nice meat and potatoes refutation of predictable Christian arguments. What I found worth highlighting in particular here on the blog was akegg’s adept way of addressing the question of what the Big Bang is said to demonstrate. Your Thoughts?
Contra The Fine Tuning Argument
August 30, 2009 – 10:12 amZJ gives a kick ass, concise, precise, logically strong, awesomely robotically delivered refutation. Seriously, it’s brilliant and thorough and you really really really should watch it: (via Toomanytribbles) Your Thoughts?
Is The Idea Of "Nothing" Illusory?
August 25, 2009 – 6:40 amI was thinking about the argument for the existence of God that hinges on the question of how something could come from nothing. And I wondered, is nothing even an intelligible concept? Everything we experience is something. We have a concept of zero since we can imagine there being zero of some particular thing either [...]
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