All week, Eric and I have been volleying back and forth about the proper places of skepticism, on the one hand, and metaphysics, on the other, in an atheist worldview and self-presentation. I have argued that placing an emphasis on an evolutionary metaphysics as the primary identifier of an atheist worldview would be perceived as [...]
Goeff has an interesting reply to my post about how faith poisons religion. In that post I talked about how religion is a vehicle for many people to get many good things. Then I put the blame on faith for making it so religion does an inadequate job of providing those goods the best it [...]
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 [...]
As a college student, in my Christian days, I remember reading C.S. Lewis explain what made Christianity plausible to him. He was persuaded that all the pagan myths that preceded the advent of Christianity were precursors of Christ. The similarities between the Christ story and numerous myths that had gone before him were not the [...]
Eric writes: Popular atheism in America celebrates versions of naturalism, materialism, empiricism, and so on, that are often based on weak arguments or even on no arguments at all. Popular atheism in America is already faith – and I’m sympathetic to the Christians who refer to it as such. Unfortunately, popular atheism is often just as [...]
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 [...]
Brown’s site’s description: With the cameras in hot pursuit, Derren faces his toughest project yet, going in search of an unsuspecting member of the British public prepared to adopt the guise of a pastor and miracle worker. His chosen one then has six months to learn the trade and flourish across the pond as a [...]
There is a lot of commotion in the atheist blogosphere about how and/or whether atheists should participate in so-called “interfaith” organizations in which (if I understand correctly) members of different religions cooperate on shared service projects, aim at shared goals together, and (possibly?) dialogue about where they might find philosophical, ethical, and political common ground [...]
One Luke Muelhauser’s readers challenged him that all his pursuit of evidence just would not matter if only he would experience “believing in Jesus and God” for himself. In reply, Luke opens up about his emotionally intense experience of Christianity: Things went so well over the next year that I started to feel like quite [...]
Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s show ash-Shariah wal-Hayat has an audience of 40 million. He is the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, is a trustee of Oxford University, and is considered a leading Muslim Brotherhood intellectual. He returned to Egypt from exile after the fall of Hosni Mubarak and led Friday prayers on February 18. [...]
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?
There are many virtues the religious have, even in distinctively religious forms which an atheist like I can appreciate specifically as religious virtues, but faith is not one of these virtues. It is a vice. And Matt Dillahunty’s video below features, especially in the last few minutes, an eloquent, passionate, personal explanation of what makes [...]
Oh boy, I just love getting letters! So, you can only imagine my enthusiasm at getting An Open Letter To The Atheist Community from a Rabbi Adam Jacobs of The Huffington Post Synagogue: My dear atheist friend, Gosh, he holds me dear! The first point I’d like to explore is that there really are no [...]
This morning, I posted a few of Evangelical Christian Drew Dyck’s condescending and disingenuous attempts to understand the growing trend of sustained apostasy among young Christians. In the last post I criticized his ideas and value prejudices which guided his discussion of the role that sexual development in young adulthood plays in leading people away [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
An Onion classic from 1998: SAN FRANCISCO–For as long as he can remember, 7-year-old Timmy Yu has had one precious dream: From the bottom of his heart, he has hoped against hope that God would someday hear his prayer to walk again. Though many thought Timmy’s heavenly plea would never be answered, his dream finally [...]
The Thinking Atheist presents “Welcome To This World” Your Thoughts?
In reply to this video on various immoral things outright commanded in what is supposed to be God’s law in the Old Testament, Loyal writes: Militaristic non-Christians often seize upon the many difficult passages where God is condoning morally repugnant acts. I am glad you admit that they are morally repugnant acts and neither morally [...]
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?