Make sure you’re sitting down and not operating any heavy machinery before you read this. I’ll wait. Oops, I just realized that I already included my earthshaking announcement in the title. I hope everybody’s still okay…. That was just plain reckless of me. Anyhoo, I’m going to be speaking at a retreat of Christian medical […]
Archives for July 2013
Have atheologians made a single contribution to knowledge?
Several of the comments in response to my article “Have theologians made a single contribution to knowledge?” have focused on a comparison between theology and science. It’s an extraordinarily presumptuous comparison: that is, it seems to presume that those who are atheistic or agnostic somehow have a claim to the success of science. Having just […]
10. A conversation with physicist Don Page (Part 2)
In this episode of The Tentative Apologist Podcast we continue our conversation with Don Page, a physicist at the University of Alberta who specializes in gravitation and black holes. As our conversation continues, we return to the relationship between Genesis 1 and scientific accounts of the universe’s origin while also exploring the nature of time […]
Have theologians made a single contribution to knowledge?
In the discussion thread to “Another pale blue dot” Honest John Law quoted Lawrence Krauss making the following declaration: “I’ve challenged theologians to give me a single example of a contribution to human knowledge that theology has provided in the last 500 years”. Presumably no theologian has succeeded in satisfying Krauss that the demand has […]
Another pale blue dot
Twenty-three years ago the Voyager space probe gave us the iconic image of earth as a pale blue dot, an image immortalized by Carl Sagan in his majestic book Pale Blue Dot. A few days ago the Cassini probe sent back its own entry to the pale blue dot catalogue, a haunting image of earth as […]
Are atheists wicked … or just foolish? A review of James Spiegel, “The Making of an Atheist”
James Spiegel. The Making of an Atheist: How Immorality Leads to Unbelief. Moody Press, 2010. If the new atheists distinguished themselves from the milquetoast atheism that preceded them by their honing of a sharper rhetorical knife, James Spiegel’s book The Making of an Atheist responds with the razor sharp edge of a Samurai sword. If the new atheists have […]
“The Unanimous Consensus of Rational People”: On “The Christian Delusion” (Part 7)
This is the seventh installment in my review of The Christian Delusion which was originally published in 2010 at “The Christian Post.” In this installment I review Jason Long’s essay, “The Malleability of the Human Mind,” 65-80. * * * All right my clear thinking little skeptics, gather close now. Today we are going to […]
The taboos of identity
Like many people I was angered and disappointed by the jury’s decision in the George Zimmerman trial. And I was certainly tempted to make sweeping conclusions about the competence of the jury. For that reason I was all the more intrigued by Will Saletan’s article at Slate, provocatively titled “You are not Trayvon Martin.” What […]
Everyone’s irrational; therefore Christians are irrational (On “The Christian Delusion” Part 6)
This is the sixth installment in my extended review of The Christian Delusion which was originally published at “The Christian Post” in 2010. * * * We now turn to the second chapter of The Christian Delusion, Valerie Tarico’s “Christian Belief through the lens of cognitive science,” 47-64. The first thing to note is that […]
9. A conversation with physicist Don Page (Part 1)
In this episode of The Tentative Apologist podcast I interview Professor Don N. Page, a theoretical physicist who works in the area of cosmology and gravitation. Dr. Page completed his PhD in physics and astronomy at Caltech (1976) and went on to complete a post-doc under Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University (1976-1979). After teaching for […]
Stephen Law accuses me of writing a shoddy review … and then responds in kind
Two years ago I reviewed Stephen Law’s book Believing Bullshit: How not to get sucked into an intellectual black hole. Professor Law provided a response this past Sunday. (Better late than never, right?) Before I engage the review let me stress that I think Stephen Law is a very intelligent philosopher and an amiable chap to boot. I […]
Those Cunning Christians: On “The Christian Delusion” (Part 5)
This is the fifth installment in my review of The Christian Delusion which was originally published at “The Christian Post” in 2010. * * * The first section of The Christian Delusion is ominously titled “Why Faith Fails.” One might expect then to find in the first essay of this section an argument illustrating to […]
Does theology make God ugly?
My podcast interview with theologian Oliver Crisp on Christology drew several interesting responses. Was Jesus the best at everything? For example, Fox observed: “If Christ were a barista, would he have made the best doppio ristretto possible? Oliver Crisp imagines so.” I addressed this similar point in my essay “Can Jesus make a better Caesar […]
Does Ganesha answer prayer?
Yesterday Honest John Law responded to my critique of Jonathan Pearce by making the following observation: “I have personally known Hindus who are educated and intelligent and fully capable of considering the degree and complexity and specificity of events, and they believe Ganesha was an agent for them. However, I doubt many Christians are willing […]
