thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
Over the years I’ve talked to a number of people who find themselves unable to commit to belief in God, but equally unable to reject belief. They say they would like to believe, for they cannot think atheism is true, but they find themselves unable to give assent to a particular religion or set of […]
A reader commenting on this blog asked me some questions about Jesus and history and I thought that they were good questions worthy of a decent response. Part of John’s comment was: “So I was curious as to what your specific Christian beliefs were …. where you stand on Christ’s divinity. It’s one thing to […]
Last post I looked at the differences between scientific thinking and religious thinking, at least as one social scientist sees it. But where does religious thinking come from? Religious belief has been an important component in virtually every culture in human history. Why is this so? Social scientists have studied this question extensively. Whether you […]
A friend and I have been discussing the Kalam Cosmological argument recently, so I thought it might be worth posting about it. The Kalam argument has been used many times by philosopher William Lane Craig in public debates, with some success. His use of the argument is itself much debated on the internet. I have […]
Many people claim to have experienced God directly in some way. They claim to have seen a vision, or received divine healing, or they have had some deep spiritual experience, or God has turned their lives around in some way. They come from different religions, even from no religion and atheism. Sometimes the experience changes […]
It’s Easter again, which evokes different responses in different people. Some people think about the claim that, after he was executed, Jesus was raised to life by God. Of all the critical comments I have received on this blog, criticism of christian belief about the resurrection of Jesus is one of the most common and […]
Recently I came across two articles that came from very different viewpoints, but raised some similar issues. It certainly made me think about how religious and anti-religious movements and ideas can have a lot more in common than you might think.
We all like to think we’re right in our beliefs, whether it be about God, politics or how our football team can play better. The interesting thing is how strongly we can disagree. A while back I came across an old newspaper column by an atheist, titled The five best reasons not to believe in […]
For some christians, and some critics too, Adam and Eve and the interpretation of chapters 1-3 of Genesis is a game-breaker. But I really don’t know why it should be. It seems to me that there is a perfectly reasonable and evidence-based way to look at this.
I am grateful to a reader Mustahsin Mir, who asked me some questions about an argument in the book Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism by David Mills. I haven’t read the book, but the argument can be followed in Amazon’s Look Inside, with Mustahsin’s questions relating to the section on page […]