Category: Atheism and Theism
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Peter Kreeft on the Benefits of Theistic Belief
This is an outstanding five-minute video by Peter Kreeft of Boston College. (HT: J. I. Odegaard) It presents the theistic worldview and its naturalistic alternative about as clearly as is possible within a few minutes. It doesn't argue for or against, but it does present the benefits of theism. It is in the Prager U…
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God and Proof
This is an addendum to clarify what I said two days ago. My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism. Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration. A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:…
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Neither the Existence Nor the Nonexistence of God is Provable
A post of mine ends like this: To theists, I say: go on being theists. You are better off being a theist than not being one. Your position is rationally defensible and the alternatives are rationally rejectable. But don't fancy that you can prove the existence of God or the opposite. In the end you…
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Christopher Hitchens, Religion, and Cognitive Dissonance
Hitchens says somewhere that he didn't suffer from cognitive dissonance of the sort that arises when a deeply internalized religious upbringing collides with the contrary values of the world, since he never took religion or theism seriously in the first place. But then I say religion was never a Jamesian live option for him. But…
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Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus
A world-wide bestseller, apparently. A religious novel that emerges from the wasteland of Soviet atheism. God just won't stay dead. One of the things that leftists and evangelical atheists never understand is that, even if religion is pure buncombe, wholly lacking in transcendent reference, it yet supplies people with immanent meaning. People want their lives…
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Does Classical Theism Logically Require Haecceitism?
Haecceitism is the doctrine that there are haecceities. But what is an haecceity? Suppose we take on board for the space of this post the assumptions that (i) properties are abstract objects, that (ii) they can exist unexemplified, and that (iii) they are necessary beings. We may then define the subclass of haecceity properties as…
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Does Evil Prove the Nonexistence of God?
I'll grant you that it does if you grant me that truth, existence, order, conscience and twenty of so other phenomena prove the existence of God. And let's not leave out the moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe. You can reasonably ask how there could be a God given the fact of natural and moral evil. …
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A Look at Some Unintelligent Design Reasoning in Dawkins
Here is an old Powerblogs post from some years ago. Still seems right to me. A student in the area wants to discuss Dawkins and his New Atheist gang with me. So I'm digging up and reviewing all my old Dawkins materials. The New Atheism is already old hat. A movement for cyberpunks and know-nothings. …
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On the Worth of Wit
Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Twelve, 2012, p. 91: If I convert it's because it's better that a believer dies than that an atheist does. Witty unto the end. But in the end, what does wit get you? One last vain flash of brilliance and then extinction — or judgment. Related articles Where Are the Honest Atheists? Ashes…
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On the Poverty of the Contemporary Atheist Movement
A fine statement by Dr. Michael Valle of Scottsdale Community College.
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Edward Feser on Jerry A. Coyne
In Omnibus of Fallacies, Ed Feser applies his formidable analytic and polemical skills to that sorry specimen of scientism, Jerry Coyne. The First Things review begins like this: Faith versus Fact is some kind of achievement. Biologist Jerry Coyne has managed to write what might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist…
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Hitchens on Falwell
The following entry has been languishing in the queue for years. I just now finished it for what it's worth. ……………. Which is worse, the fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell or the snarling hatred of religion of a Christopher Hitchens, who, in his anti-Falwell diatribe, shows just how far someone who is a leftist about…
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Gary Gutting on Richard Dawkins’ Logical Mistakes
Here. Atheism we will always have with us. But in a few years the puerile and uninformed fulminations and excesses of the New Atheists will be forgotten.
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Galen Strawson: It is Certain that the Christian God does not Exist!
Here, in The New York Review of Books: To the Editors: Thomas Nagel writes that “whether atheists or theists are right depends on facts about reality that neither of them can prove” [“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” Letters, NYR, November 8]. This is not quite right: it depends on what kind of theists we have to…
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The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil
It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils. As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and…