Archive: February, 2012
Believers and skeptics and lots of baloney
Fifteen years ago when I lived in Vancouver I used to frequent a sandwich shop in Port Kells that was famous for its massive sub sandwiches. I remember in particular the breathtakingly generous slabs of baloney. I thought of that shop, and its endless supply of baloney, as I read John Loftus’ latest reply to my [...]
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Would intelligent aliens present a problem for Christianity?
Jeff commented on my recent article “Should you call out Gouranga?” and in doing so offered a helpful basis to kickstart our discussion of exotheology. He is of the opinion that it is a problem to Christian theology if there are ”intelligent species in the cosmos other than humans” for as he says “then we’re left [...]
Read moreShould you have faith in John W. Loftus?
Yesterday I received an email from my co-author (God or Godless, Baker, 2013), atheist John W. Loftus. He said in the email “I wrote something with you in mind” and then provided a link to the following article in his blog: Faith is an Irrational Leap over the Probabilities Good ole’ John. Let’s go to the [...]
Read moreFrom a field of dreams to a storm shelter of dread: A Review of “Take Shelter”
One day Ray Kinsella heard a voice in his cornfield, “If you build it, he will come.” And so begins the great American feel good story of a struggling farmer who builds a baseball diamond in his backyard. But what if Ray was waiting not for the arrival of a mysterious man but rather of a [...]
Read moreOne of these causes is not like the others: Getting behind the personal incredulity of ‘skeptics’
Why is it, I wondered, that the minute you point out that agent casuation is a perfectly familiar concept (it provides a fine explanation of the sentence you’re reading, for example) and then add that it is thus in principle a concept worth considering as an explanation of the universe’s existence, some people make the leap [...]
Read moreWhy is it that when you mention God somebody always mentions leprechauns?
It never fails. Mention God within the context of a sufficiently broad audience and somebody will raise the issue of leprechauns. I have lamented this unfortunate phenomenon in the past. This time the guilty party is a stalwart reader, Ray Ingles, who in response to my previous article on God and agent causation observes: “Some types [...]
Read moreGod and other not so strange causes
It is not uncommon in dialogues with atheists to hear the claim that invoking God as an explanation is something strange and totally foreign to experience. I call this the “foreign to experience objection” or F-TEO for short. The objection is that God is some kind of out of this world explanation (figuratively and literally I [...]
Read moreMore on Mormons, atheism and aliens
There has been some incredulity toward my claim that Mormons are really atheists. But that is not very surprising. As I have pointed out, the professional class in most fields of discourse holds definitions of terms that differ substantially from views widely held in the general population. Ask Joe the Plumber to define “free action”, “mind” and [...]
Read moreWhy Mormons are probably atheists
davidstarlingm has asked how the definitions that I provided for “God” and “theism” would relate to Mormonism: “where do the various flavors of polytheism, including Mormonism, fall into your definition? The Mormon Elohim is not the ultimate agent cause of everything that exists, as he is both contingent on a higher entity (the creator of [...]
Read moreAtheists who don’t know what they don’t believe in
I regularly dialogue with people who, though they identify themselves as “atheists”, do not have a clear sense of how God — that which they purportedly don’t believe in — should be defined. To be sure, they are able to say in a piecemeal fashion “I don’t believe in Yahweh, Thor or Allah…” but they can’t get [...]
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