Thirty years ago teenager John Daniel McCollum shot and killed himself in his parents’ house while listening to the Ozzy Osbourne record Blizzard of Oz. When his grieving parents discovered that the album included the song “Suicide Solution” they proceeded with a lawsuit against Osbourne, arguing that the song was a proximate cause of their […]
The God Delusion
The ignorance of Richard Dawkins defended (but not very well)
After I complained yet again about the ignorant way that Dawkins engages with philosophical theology and related disciplines, Ray countered by quoting a fellow named Anthony Gottleib who observed: For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review […]
Can Dawkins (or at least his argument) be saved?
Ray Ingles is confident that Dawkins’ argument can be saved and that I’m being unfair to it somehow. He claims that my Dawkins exegesis is lacking, that I steamroll context, that I show no charity. I’m a fair individual. I’m willing to listen to anybody who wants to argue that this argument, which by Dawkins’ […]
Why no professional philosopher would use Dawkins’ argument
I have been accused of being unfair to Dick Dawkins. Well let’s look at what Dawkins calls “the central argument of my book” (The God Delusion, 187). He summarizes it in six steps. Steps 4-6 are not directly relevant to the core of the argument against God, so I’ve only reproduced steps 1-3 (see The […]
