Randal Rauser

Home of progressively evangelical, generously orthodox, rigorously analytic, revolutionary Christian thinking (that's what I'm aiming for anyway)

Dan Barker

Why It Matters Whether Christianity is Intellectually Respectable: Quick Reflections on the Debate

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My debate with Dan Barker was on the question “Is Christianity intellectually respectable?” I argued the affirmative. My method was simple: offer a definition of “intellectual respectability” and provide good evidence that Christianity has met the definition. To that end, I pointed out that “respectability” is a social concept referencing positive social status. The qualifier […]

Is the Christian God Worthy of Worship? A Debate with Dan Barker

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Dan Barker is a former fundamentalist preacher-turned-atheist, author of many books including Godless and God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, and co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. In this informal from December 22 2020, we addressed the question “Is the Christian God Worthy of Worship?”

Atheist Polemic for Pastor Dan: A Review of God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction

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Dan Barker. God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction. New York: Sterling, 2016. At the beginning of chapter 2 of his bestselling book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins infamously describes God as “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, […]

The Scattershot Atheist: The Dan Barker/Trent Horn Debate: A Review (Part 2)

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Here’s part 1 of my review where I provide a summary and critique of Trent Horn’s opening statement. You can also click that link to watch the debate itself. I now turn to my review of Dan Barker’s opening statement. As I said, in part 1, I undertook a detailed summary of Horn’s opening statement followed […]

The Dan Barker/Trent Horn Debate: A Review (Part 1)

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A couple of months ago, Catholic apologist Trent Horn debated atheist Dan Barker on the question, “Does the Christian God exist?” I am going to post a two-part review of the debate which focuses on their opening statements. In this first installment of the review, I will summarize and critically engage with Horn’s 15-minute opening statement. A […]

Atheists who celebrate intellectual regression

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Intellectual development involves, among other things, the increased ability to analyze the views of others with critical nuance and charity. At its most sophisticated level, that trend includes the skill of rigorous devil’s advocacy, i.e. the ability to defend the views of others with as much sophistication and putative conviction as genuine advocates for the […]

Gotcha! The Worst Part of Debates

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A gentleman named Michael Nugent is planning to debate William Lane Craig next month. And so he’s reached out to Twitter for advice. Personally, I would not advise going to Twitter for debate advice. But there you have it. The tweets flooded in, including this one from Dan Barker: Ask him, "If God told you […]

Godless of the Gaps

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In “God of the Gaps and Mind of the Gaps” I quoted Dan Barker writing the following in Godless: “Many of these [theistic] arguments are reduced to a ‘god of the gaps’ strategy. At most, the theists might prove the existence of a current gap in human knowledge, but this does not justify filling the gap […]

On reading a few sentences of Dan Barker’s Godless

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I’ve had Dan Barker’s book Godless sitting on my shelf for a couple years but I haven’t yet had a chance to read it. However, today I opened it up and read the following passage: “Exodus 22:18 says, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ This one verse was responsible for the murder of thousands, perhaps […]

Overly Uptight Atheist Activists?

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This week Jon Stewart’s Daily Show featured a segment on Mary’s Gourmet Diner in North Carolina with the (hilarious) correspondent Jordan Klepper. The controversy arose because Mary’s offers a 15% discount to those who pray before their meal. This was enough to raise the ire of  Dan Barker, author of Godless, and co-president of the Freedom from Religion […]