thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
A reader, Hugo, and I have been discussing the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God in the comments section of another post. His most recent comment contained a number of interesting points, so I thought there was enough for a new post. So here are Hugo’s comments, shown as blockquotes, with my responses. (I […]
J Warner (Jim) Wallace is a homicide detective, and an atheist-turned christian. This is his story and the reasons why he changed his mind about Jesus.
I’m not sure how seriously I take this story, but it is interesting – attempting to measure something intangible. How certain are writers about what they say about God and ethics? And how open-minded do they think they are? So I hope it’s worth a look.
I expect discussions between christians and atheists to get edgy at times. We are talking about important matters and the two ‘sides’ are poles apart. But some responses seem extreme, even to people on the same side.
Human beings have a wide variety of beliefs and opinions on almost any subject you can imagine. This is just as true for the ‘big’ topics of God, religion, ethics, politics and purpose in life. And most of us like to think we are ‘right’ – we have the truth, and others don’t. But we […]
Why do you believe what you do – about religion, politics, ethics or life itself? Many sceptics about religion are evidentialists, that is, they believe we should proportion our belief according to the evidence. Different disciplines (e.g. law, science, history, journalism and everyday life) require different types of evidence, but the principle seems reasonable. But […]
I’ve been blogging for about 8 years and discussing the existence of God for even longer. From that experience, it is clear the christians are generally pretty sure that God exists, and atheists even surer that she doesn’t. Genuine agnostics are much thinner on the ground. The strange thing is, each side believes they have […]
I didn’t have high expectations of this book. I’m not that much interested in the so-called new atheists, nor in those who argue against them. And I think the world probably has quite enough books about CS Lewis. But I am interested in the philosophical arguuments generally. And I am a great fan of Lewis […]
My friend Howie has a blog, Truth is Elusive, and his latest post discusses the philosophical arguments for the existence of God, and whether they are effective or even useful. His broad conclusion is “not very” – that is not for him, not for many people, only for a few. I mostly agree with Howie […]
Most of us like to think we are reasonable people. Most of us think we have good reasons why we believe in God, or disbelieve. But we all probably know people who think quite differently to us, and yet they think their reasons are reasonable and ours are not. How can we understand what’s going […]