I attended camp every summer as a kid. Most of the time, this camp would be indistinguishable from other summer camps. My friends and I would play basketball, pass notes back and forth with girls, listen to music, etc. The rest of the time, however, the camp was quite different. You see, this was a …
Tag Archive: god
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 …
Jan 05
The Parable of the Sheep
The young girl awoke with a start to the sound of desperate bleating. She quickly dressed and ran outside, fearing the worst. The pen which held her sheep—her precious sheep that she cared for daily—was open. Carcasses and blood were everywhere. She had to find her father; he was the only one who could help. …
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 10
The Lazy Person’s Guide to Dismantling the Moral Argument
I once was part of a comment thread where theists were asked what their favorite arguments in favor of God’s existence were[i]. The argument that seemed to stand above the rest by my informal count was the so-called Moral Argument. If you’re not familiar with this argument, it goes as follows: 1. If God does …
Oct 27
Many Worlds and Ultimate Justice
Here is a strange progression I just went through in my car. Suppose something like Everett’s many worlds hypothesis is correct. Under this, every possible outcome is equally real. There is a you reading this right now, a you who decided to eat a sandwich instead, and perhaps infinitely many other yous. It struck me …
Sep 30
Explaining Logic
Glenn Hendrickson, in his essay Christianity Explains Logic, makes what I consider a shockingly bold claim. Hendrickson claims that the Christian worldview alone accounts for the laws of logic.[i] I’ll begin by directly quoting Hendrickson’s formulation of the argument: 1. All we experience is grounded in the laws of logic. 2. The Christian worldview …
Sep 30
Why Christianity is False (Index)
The author of Common Sense Atheism, Luke Muehlhauser, began a counter-apologetics project called ‘Why Christianity is False.’ This project’s goal was to specifically respond to each essay in the series ‘Why Christianity is True,’ hosted by Brian Auten of Apologetics 315. Unfortunately for those of us who enjoyed this series by Luke, he decided to …
Sep 23
Free Will and Evil
Christian apologist Stephen Bedard recently made the following claim as part of a broader discussion of evil and the existence of God: If God took away free will for doing evil, he would have to take away the free will to do good. If we are not free to hate, we are not free to …
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