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Randal Rauser

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

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Michael Shermer

Militant Agnosticism

December 29, 2020 by Randal

Michael Shermer describes his own disbelief in God as follows: “I once saw a bumper sticker that read ‘Militant Agnostic: I don’t know and You Don’t Either.’ This is my position on God’s existence: I don’t know and you don’t either.”[1] Shermer is right to call that position “militant”. To claim that nobody can know […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: agnosticism, Michael Shermer

A Review of The Moral Arc Part 3: From Absurdities to Atrocities

July 29, 2017 by Randal

For Part 2 of this review click here. Early on in The Moral Arc Michael Shermer quotes Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” (7) It’s clear that Shermer likes this quote because he returns to it on several occasions. At one point he offers a different translation: “Truly, whoever […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: ethics, Michael Shermer, review, The Moral Arc, utilitarianism

A Review of The Moral Arc Part 2: Reason as Rhetoric

July 20, 2017 by Randal

For Part 1 of this review click here. Imagine that you’re over at your friend Mike’s house for dinner when he pulls out a Monopoly box and invites you to a game. “But before we get started,” he says, “the rules are that I get $500 every time I pass go and you don’t get […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: empiricism, humanism, Michael Shermer, review, secularism, The Moral Arc, witches

A Review of The Moral Arc Part 1: Abortion

July 17, 2017 by Randal

Michael Shermer. The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. New York: Henry Holt, 2015. 543 pp. As I read it, Michael Shermer’s 2015 book The Moral Arc is a sweeping 500 page apologetic for two theses: the optimism thesis (the world is getting better); and the secular thesis (that improvement […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: atheism, Christianity, Enlightenment, humanism, Michael Shermer, secularism

Notes on the David Wood-Michael Shermer Debate

December 5, 2016 by Randal

This week “Unbelievable” was preempted for an annual fundraising drive. In place of the regular show Justin Brierley posted a recent debate between Christian apologist David Wood and skeptic Michael Shermer. I’m only about half way through the debate at this point, having listened to opening statements and rebuttals. But I can say that this […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: apologetics, atheism, David Wood, debate, Michael Shermer

Peter Boghossian’s Manual for Wasting Paper (Part 1)

February 12, 2014 by Randal

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013. As some of you will know, I originally purchased Peter Boghossian’s book A Manual for Creating Atheists after Justin Brierley sent me a tentative invitation to debate with Boghossian on “Unbelievable”. When Boghossian then refused to appear on the program with me based on his insistence […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: A Manual for Creating Atheists, apologetics, atheism, fundamentalism, Michael Shermer, Peter Boghossian, review

Should you marry your theology to the latest science?

September 30, 2011 by Randal

I’ve been slowly reading through Michael Shermer’s How We Believe in my spare time. It is a pleasant enough read, but has many noticeable weaknesses. Perhaps the biggest weakness is that Shermer is an advocate of the separation or two worlds model of theology and science (what Stephen Jay Gould called the “NOMA” or non-overlapping […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: Michael Shermer, NOMA, religion, science, theology, two worlds

Is doubt good? Is skepticism a virtue?

September 14, 2011 by Randal

While reading through Michael Shermer’s enjoyable book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism and the Search for God (New York: Henry Holt, 2000) I came across the following passage: “Doubt is good. Questioning belief is healthy. Skepticism is okay. It is more than okay, in fact. Skepticism is a virtue and science is a valuable tool […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: belief, doubt, epistemology, How We Believe, Michael Shermer, rationality, reason, skepticism

Inerrancy faces anti-trinitarians, open theists and holocaust deniers

April 7, 2011 by Randal

Ever since its founding the Evangelical Theological Society has required a core confession of its members: the inerrancy of scripture in the autographs. Then they discovered (in the early 80s as I recall) that non-trinitarian oneness people had infiltrated their ranks. It would seem that confession of inerrancy does not ensure that one will come […]

Filed Under: The Tentative Apologist Tagged With: anti-semitism, Bruce Ware, Clark Pinnock, ETS, inerrancy, Michael Shermer, open theism, Raul Hilberg, Trinitarianism

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