When too much evidence is barely enough?

May 9th, 2012

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 […]

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How reliable is the New Testament text?

April 26th, 2012

From time to time I hear people say that the New Testament has been significantly changed since it was first written, so we cannot have any confidence in we are reading. Who knows if it is an accurate reflection of what the original authors wrote? Eminent scholar Bart Ehrman’s 2005 book Misquoting Jesus suggests “how […]

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Atheist myths?

April 23rd, 2012

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 […]

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Another healing??

April 15th, 2012

I came across another story of an apparently miraculous healing the other day. But can I believe it really happened and it was really a miracle? How can we avoid both naive gullibility and closed-minded scepticism? Does it really matter?

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An atheist convert

April 5th, 2012

I have come across on the internet many atheists who were once christians. With church attendance dropping in most western countries, it may seem like changes in belief are all one way. But statistics show otherwise – that there are almost as many people changing from atheism to belief in God as are going the […]

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Do children naturally believe in God?

March 29th, 2012

Many modern atheists oppose the teaching of religion to children. Richard Dawkins has famously said that teaching religion to children is a form of child abuse. In 2004 he wrote: “Isn’t it a form of child abuse to label children as possessors of beliefs that they are too young to have thought about?”. And in […]

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Lawrence Krauss and creation from nothing

March 25th, 2012

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 […]

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Bart Ehrman on did Jesus exist?

March 22nd, 2012

Over the past two centuries, historical scholars have argued over what we can know about Jesus. Virtually all scholars (regardless of religion) now agree Jesus was a real person whose life followed the general outline in the gospels. However enthusiastic amateurs are still promoting the idea that Jesus didn’t exist. Books have been published and […]

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Atheist arguments

March 18th, 2012

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 […]

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Easter eggs and slavery

March 15th, 2012

Easter’s coming soon, and if you live in the west as I do, you’ll probably be eating your share of easter eggs. But what if the eggs came from cocoa grown using child labour, that is effectively slave labour?

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A list of all blog posts, in reverse chronological order, is on the Blog archive page.