A long-time commenter at my blog, Jeff Kesterson, asked me to take a look at his 2018 article “An Overview of the Problem of Evil | Denying the Problem: Reformed Epistemology.” The article offers a critique of reformed epistemology and specifically Alvin Plantinga and yours truly. I’m not going to recap the argument here — […]
defeaters
Share Your Candidate for the Best Argument Against Christianity
Just over a month ago I wrote an article inviting my readers to “Share Your Candidate for the Worst Argument Against Christianity.” It is now time to offer the complementary invitation of sharing your candidate for the best argument against Christianity. What do I mean by “best”? Well, for starters one expects that the argument will be valid (deductive; […]
Share Your Candidate for the Worst Argument Against Christianity
Let’s have some conversation. I’d like to invite folks to share their comments here on what they believe to be the very worst arguments against Christianity. The only stipulation is that these are arguments which you’ve heard somebody defend. Preferably, they are arguments that you’ve heard more than one person defend. If you can document […]
“Why I Became an Atheist”: A Review (Part 6)
This is the sixth installment of my meandering review of John Loftus’ book Why I Became an Atheist. For part five click here. In this section I’m going to critique Loftus’ understanding and presentation of Alvin Plantinga’s epistemology in chapter 2. This section begins on page 44. Since I defended Plantinga’s epistemology in my PhD thesis […]
Should we believe the universe exists?
TAM quoted Jerry Coyne as asking “what conceivable observation about the universe could convince you that God does not exist?” I responded by attempting to draw out the principles lying behind Coyne’s question. And I came up with the following: (a) If there are no conceivable observations of the universe that could convince you that […]
Does extraordinary uncleanliness require extraordinary soap?
Once again the claim has surfaced: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And once again I have had to shoot it down. Now what could be the problem with a principle so symmetrically reasonable? Grey days produce grey moods. Cold weather requires a cold weather jacket. Why wouldn’t extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? The problem starts […]