A Logical Argument from Evil and Perfection (2012) Luke Tracey The purpose of this paper is to advance an argument from evil against the existence of God as standardly conceived by philosophers of religion—that is, God conceived of as a perfect being. Because this argument is logical rather than evidential, I begin by framing it […]

In Chapter Four of Science, Confirmation, and the Theistic Hypothesis, Keith Parsons defends the dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as part of a general critique of miracle claims which aims to defend naturalism as a rational operating philosophy against potential defeaters. In this defense of miracle claims Don McIntosh argues, first, that for any unknown the burden of proof falls equally upon naturalists and supernaturalists; second, to repudiate all miracle claims in one fell swoop with a mere presumption of naturalism renders naturalism unfalsifiable and unscientific; and third, estimating the prior probability of miracles introduces an element of subjectivity that makes any general probabilistic argument against them suspect. These points leave open the possibility of confirming specific miracle claims on the basis of historical evidence and eyewitness testimony.

This paper discusses arguments from perfection, both for and against the existence of God. It begins with a simple argument from perfection for the existence of God and argues that it is unsuccessful. Then it defends two kinds of arguments from perfection against the existence of God. The first ones are inductive and thus present atheism as a tentative conclusion, while the second one is deductive and thus purports to conclusively demonstrate atheism based on the logical inconsistency between God's existence and the imperfect world in which we live.

The paper assesses a modal version of the cosmological argument that is motivated by the so-called "questions of existence." It begins by formulating the argument before offering a critical assessment of it. Specifically, it argues that it not only fails as a proof of the existence of God, but that it is not even rationally acceptable. It concludes that it does not provide rational justification for belief in God.

Many of our intuitions were not cobbled together by evolution for discerning truth, but for building approximations of reality that were useful to our ancestors. A number of skewed ways of thinking are well known to psychologists. Just as human beings are biologically "prewired" to learn language from their social environment, thinking in terms of the supernatural may also be inborn. Our biases might therefore explain why empirically vacuous claims about gods, souls, afterlives, and so on are rhetorically effective: they fit well with people's prescientific intuitions. In this paper Adam Lewis explores how these intuitions shape beliefs about gods as supernatural agents, drawing on examples from the Koran, before finally considering their impact on beliefs about the soul and related afterlife beliefs.

If God is all-powerful, then he can prevent evil; and if he is as good as can be, then he will prevent it. Why, then, does evil exist? The existence of evil implies that either God is not all-powerful, or he is not perfectly good. And if the traditional God must be both, then the existence of evil entails that such a God does not exist. Unless, of course, God has some morally sufficient reason for permitting evil—to prevent even greater evils, perhaps, or to enable some greater good. But examples of apparently pointless evils could be multiplied indefinitely, and some evils are so egregiously awful that no conceivable attendant good would be great enough to justify permitting them. But perhaps there are attendant goods that we, with our finite minds, simply cannot conceive. Perhaps; but this solution comes at a price. If we can have no inkling of what God would permit to happen, then we can equally have no inkling of whether God does, or even could, exist.

(2011) Dan Ferrisi Review: Kevin Nelson. 2010. The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain: A Neurologist’s Search for the God Experience. New York, NY: Dutton. 326 pp. Those who are spiritually inclined diverge sharply from those with a strictly rationalist perspective over an afterlife, “the immortal soul,” and near-death experiences. Nevertheless, it seems probable that all […]