thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
Most people believe some things are right (e.g. helping others or being honest) and other things are wrong (e.g. rape, genocide or pedophilia). And if you tried to defend any of those “wrong” behaviours, most people would think you had lost your humanity. They think those things really are wrong. But what makes them wrong? […]
Michael Ruse is a philosopher specialising in the philosophy of science, especially biology and evolution. He is an atheist, but one with more respect for religious belief than many prominent atheists today. Ruse has some interesting things to say about science, belief in God and his more militant atheist colleagues.
I’ve been discussing with atheists and other non-believers on the internet for about 6 years now, and patterns start to emerge. One pattern relates to the evidence required to believe in God. Generally, atheists say that beliefs should be based on evidence, and nothing else. Yet I see approaches to evidence that don’t conform to […]
Atheists sometimes characterise christians as people who believe in myths and magic, based on faith, which is the opposite of reason. I think this can be shown to generally be a mis-characterisation (see Is faith the opposite of reason? and Science, faith and certainty). But what if the tables were turned? What if many atheists […]
The Cosmological argument attempts to show that God exists by considering what caused the universe. The universe couldn’t cause itself to exist, the argument says, nor could it exist for no reason, so an external agent must have caused it. And what else could that external agent be than God? Despite various attempts to refute […]
It is almost a truism that atheists in western countries have ‘come out of the closet’, and are now enthusiastically pressing christians and other believers to recognise that their faith is unjustifiable. So what are the arguments they mostly use to support this conclusion? Over the past 6 years, I have engaged in discussions with […]
When we think about the question of “Is there a God?”, I guess we mostly think of arguments for and against. How did the universe get here if it wasn’t created? Does the suffering in the world prove there is no God? But there is another way to look at it.
I came across this the other day, on The official blog of University of Missouri Skeptics, Atheists, Secular Humanists, & Agnostics
Christians and other theists sometimes argue for God’s existence based on facts about the universe that science cannot explain, or has not yet explained. But non-believers sometimes accuse these arguments of being fallacious, because they use ‘God of the Gaps’ reasoning. Is this a problem?
A week or two back I posted on scientist Jerry Coyne’s discussion of free will (Jerry Coyne: why we don’t have free will) I have just come across a discussion of Coyne’s views on former academic philosopher Bill Vallicella’s blog, Maverick Philosopher. It’s pretty strongly critical, but worth reading.