In this essay, I’m going to take on a common claim that a form of narrow naturalism can rightly be called faith. The form of naturalism I have in mind is one that says for any given unexplained event, it is overwhelmingly likely that the real explanation will be a naturalistic one. So, for example, …
Category Archive: Philosophy
Mar 29
Current Thoughts on the Kalam Cosmological Argument
I recently had a comment on one of the first posts I ever wrote. In this post, I discussed classic arguments for God, including the Cosmological Argument. This is the traditional argument that asserts that everything that exists must have a cause. The standard reply to that premise is to say that God is something …
Mar 21
False Dilemmas
One of the many problems we face in arguing about gods is the danger of running into a false dilemma. I am specifically concerned with arguments for theism, which I think contain many false dilemmas, but arguments for atheism should also be wary of the problem. What we will see in many apologetic arguments in …
Mar 06
New Philosophy of Physics Blog
There is a new blog that I recommend you follow, if you’re interested in the philosophy of physics. http://philocosmology.wordpress.com/ I’m personally excited about this prospect because there should be top-notch philosophers involved, and I expect the discussion to reflect that. This means it offers an excellent learning opportunity within a very difficult subject. Physics rears …
Feb 21
The Greatest Possible World: Comments on Leibniz, Voltaire, and Skeptical Theism
One can extract the following argument from Gottfried Leibniz in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence: (1) Acts of God cannot contain a flaw. (2) The creation of the world was an act of God. (3) Therefore, the world is without flaw. This view was in response to certain aspects of Isaac Newton’s mechanical philosophy published mainly in …
Feb 17
Where is God?
The answers to the following questions are all completely consistent with traditional Christian theology. Where is God? Nowhere Where is my soul? Nowhere Where is Heaven/Hell? Nowhere I’d like to point out that these answers that would be given by a proper theologian are the exact same answers we would expect if asked …
Dec 30
Absence of Evidence is Evidence of Absence
Recently, I’ve written about some introductory topics in Bayes’ Theorem. If you did not read these earlier pieces, you may want to go here and here before reading this post. The initial impetus was to use the theorem to defend a famous maxim often attributed to Carl Sagan—extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This time, I’m …
Dec 29
God and Intrinsic Value
I have a new post at An American Atheist. It argues that intrinsic value cannot come from God. If interested, you can read it here: God and Intrinsic Value Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Tweet about it Subscribe to the comments on this post
Dec 28
Are the Ten Commandments just?
Here is an argument with premises that are fairly easy to defend, but which leads to powerful conclusions where traditional theism is concerned: 1. Justice means to give people what they deserve. 2. People do not deserve to be punished for acts in which they had no role. 3. Descendants who are not yet born …
Nov 29
The hiddenness argument revisited (II) by J.L. Schellenberg
In an earlier post, I outlined the argument from hiddenness by J.L. Schellenberg along with his responses to several criticisms of the argument. These criticisms were grouped together in virtue of being irrelevant, according to Schellenberg. They generally were either already covered by one of his premises or could be explained away by further clarification. …
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