A process atheist is someone who agrees that every question that used to be answered by appealing to God can be better answered by appealing to some form of evolution. So you might wonder about the meaning of the term evolution. Since the term evolution is abstract, it’s definition will be abstract: a process is [...]
Order, complexity, regularity, patterning, are all examples of features that I’ll just refer to as lovely. It’s a term of art, and it’s a lovely term. Within many familiar systems, loveliness is very very rare. It’s very rare within the models of simple physical theories and even more rare within the models of complex physical [...]
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 [...]
All design arguments reason from the organization in our universe to the existence of some divine designer. What does this designer do? Design implies deliberate selection from a plurality of alternative possibilities. It cannot be selection from one possibility nor can it be random selection. It has to be rational selection. According to Leibniz, God [...]
Every one of the standard arguments for the existence of God can be reformulated as an argument against the existence of God. Consider the Fine Tuning Argument. The theistic version of the Fine Tuning Argument goes like this: (1) The Fine Tuning Argument is sound. (2) If the Fine Tuning Argument is sound, then there [...]
Mathematics is effective in science. Wigner (1960: 14) regards this effectiveness as magical: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” The prudent reply that it is surely not very scientific to base scientific reasoning [...]
Leibniz’s version of the cosmological argument (his Sufficient Reason Argument) runs from the continency of our universe to the existence of some necessary being. This necessary being is the ground of our universe. The ground isn’t part of our universe – it stands in no spatial, temporal, or causal relation to any thing in our [...]
The cosmological argument is really a family of arguments. Some of the cosmological arguments are very concrete. Aquinas’s Second Way and the Kalam Argument (popularized by William Lane Craig) reason back to some first cause of the universe at the beginning of time. Atheists (like Quentin Smith) have given various replies to these first cause [...]
Atheists and theists have a strange secret agreement. You can see it if you look at the way they treat the arguments for God, like the cosmological argument. The theists say: (1) If the reasoning in the cosmological argument is correct, then God exists. (2) The reasoning in the cosmological argument is correct. (3) Therefore, [...]
Atheists can use the traditional arguments for God in strange new ways. There’s no reason to reject those arguments – on the contrary, I think they should be carefully studied, and their flaws should be repaired. But I don’t think they lead to God. I love the Cosmological Arguments. And the ones I love most [...]
You’ve probably heard the old question: Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s unfortunate when theists screw this up. They say: Because God created the universe! Of course, since God is something, you can’t use God to answer the question. The universe coming from God is just something from something. And it’s doubly unfortunate [...]
This is another, meditative Sunday afternoon song, each of I’ve lifted from either this post or its comments section). This one though is not satirical and should be genuinely amenable to the more sophisticated theist (or pantheist or other believer in a philosopher’s god of some sort), who wants more God in her view of [...]
In my last post, I made clear that I am by no means an “accommodationist” who wants to let religious claims to hegemony over ethics, metaphysics, or epistemology go unchallenged as part of a deal whereby it agrees to either cooperate with or, minimally, not interfere with science education and science-based public policy. In a [...]
One often hears the refrain that it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution. And it is in fact true, both psychologically and, more importantly, logically, that one may both believe in God and in evolution. Psychologically we have ample evidence that plenty of people believe in both and logically it is clear that [...]
Recently, on Facebook, I boiled down my philosophical and scientific objections to theistic evolution to pithy status update size and received a good deal of discussion as a result. I plan to edit, reprint, and possibly expand upon my remarks on theistic evolution on Camels With Hammers soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to [...]
Yesterday 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 [...]
I 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?
djarm67, a scientifically literate theist, presents the creationist A Questions of Origins while correcting each distortion, oversimplification, and error as it occurs: There are six parts, watch them all if you have the time. Your Thoughts?
Some 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?
This post is inspired by some excellent remarks from Daniel Dennett in reply to William Lane Craig’s vigorous cosmological arguments for the existence of God (which you can see him make in a separate debate here). Here is the Dennett video, below it you’ll find a rough transcript I have produced of it, and then [...]
I 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 [...]
A captivating lecture: Your Thoughts?
An utterly fascinating dialogue, Coyne throughout is a novel, deeply scientifically informed, and riveting thinker and Dawkins puts exactly the right questions and brief challenges to him. Watch all 7 parts, they’re great. Your Thoughts?