Transcendence?
Could it be that Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and a well-known critic of religion, believes in transcendence—and perhaps even in God? Author Lisa Miller of Newsweek International seems to think so. What are the facts?
Transcendence?
The Intractable Problem of Time
The problem of time is a serious conundrum for Christian and other Abrahamic religions: God, since he must have always existed, evidently waited a very long time before creating the world. In fact, he waited for an eternity. How can this be? How can it be that the author of the universe and everything in it spent an eternity before creating the cosmos? This question is relevant both to theism and to Deism; it is central to the question of any deity whatever.
Questions of Existence and the Modal Cosmological Argument
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.
Christianity — An Irreverent History
A humorous, irreverent and succinct look at the (inexplicable?) history of Christianity.
A Wikipedia Editor Looks at the Bible
Skeptics say the Bible is difficult to understand, that its structure and narrative don't make sense, that it contradicts itself, even within the same book. But how did the authors let this happen? Why did the ancients themselves produce what can look like such an unevenly edited jumble?
Vestigial Structures
Do vestigial organs exist? Answers in Genesis says no. Craig Gosling says yes. Who is right? Does it matter? What is the significance of vestigial organs if they do exist?
William Lane Craig and Human Suffering
In 1984, Josef Fritzl lured his teenage daughter, Elisabeth—whom he had already abused on previous occasions—into the basement of the family home. What Elisabeth did not know was that her father had converted the basement into a dungeon, in which Elisabeth would be confined for the next twenty-four years. During this period, Fritzl raped his daughter on numerous occasions, and Elisabeth gave birth to seven children, some of whom never saw the light of day until they were rescued many years later. How might a Christian apologist such as William Lane Craig explain the suffering of Elisabeth Fritzl and her children? What we will see is that Dr. Craig's attempts to explain evil and human suffering in conjunction with the existence of the traditional God of theism fall far short of meeting their mark.
Why Religion is Persuasive: How Religious Rhetoric Taps into Intuitions Underlying Religious Thought
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.
A Simple Statement of the Problem of Evil
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.
Review of The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain
(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 […]
Atheist Ethics: Who Decides What Is Good?
After eleven years in the Catholic priesthood, Dr. Uhl followed his agnostic conscience, left the Church and became a family psychologist. Much of his joy and success in his psychology practice came from helping his clients deal with their superstition-based guilt and fears. This article on atheist ethics is based on his presentation at the 2009 AAI (Atheist Alliance International) Convention in Burbank, CA.
Dialogue Between a Protestant Minister and a Dying Teenager
I decided to write this story as a way of explaining my position as an atheist. Like the teen in the dialogue, I believe that there is no objective meaning to life and that we have an opportunity to create our own subjective meaning. "Imagine" by John Lennon is my favorite song because of its beautiful melody, voice, and the message it tells. I thought that a fictional dialogue would be a satisfying method to express my views. The idea of a dialogue between a minister and a dying person was inspired by the Marquis de Sade's work Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man, wherein a priest tries to convert a Man to Christianity before he dies.
Prosecuting the Anti-Christ for Identity Theft
People are watching for the Anti-Christ to trigger the end times. Although there are wildly divergent schools of thought on the topic, it appears that most people who believe in the inevitability of the Anti-Christ as part of the eschatological terrain also believe that he will be a wolf in sheep's clothing or, more precisely, a demon in savior's robe. The Anti-Christ will portray himself to be Jesus, and people will likely fall for the ruse to Jesus' great detriment. Can prosecutors indict and convict the Anti-Christ for identity theft? This article explores that possibility and explores some of the obstacles that prosecutors are likely to face.
The Nature of Information: A Doorway to a Postreligious World
Atheism is not a worldview and provides no understanding of the nature of the universe; it is simply a denial of the existence of God and it is essentially useless as a contribution to our understanding of the world. So, the question arises—if there is no God, what is the nature of the universe and how can we understand it and our place in it?
Omniscience and Learning
If God is omniscient, it seems that he would have to know what it is like to learn. However, in order to know what it is like to learn, one must have learned something. This entails that at one time we were in a state of not-knowing a thing that was learned, then experienced what it is like to learn. But if God is essentially omniscient, he always is and has been omniscient, so was never in a state of not-knowing. Because being in a state of not-knowing is necessary to know what it is like to learn, we would seem to have to say that God does not know what it is like to learn. But this contradicts the original claim that he does know this based on his omniscience. Thus, it seems that God's omniscience generates a contradiction. Consequently an omniscient God cannot exist.
The Conjugation of Church and State
"Most religious individuals have the best intentions at heart, and truly believe that their god and their way of life is what is best for everyone; if these ideals become law they will only end up alienating and incriminating the innocent."
Why Choose Creationism?
"It is misguided to regard the growth of Creationism as a major threat to Western civilization. On the contrary, Creationism is exactly what we can expect to see from a collapsing religion. It's last-ditch defensive behavior—the equivalent of a hedgehog rolling into a ball. It's what's left of Christianity when all the behavioral precepts have been discarded. It is belief for the sake of belief. So if you're an atheist, please don't waste too much energy on Creationism."
Original Sin: Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It
In this paper Richard Schoenig argues that Christianity "can't live with" its doctrine of original sin insofar as it is implausible and morally indefensible, and that Christianity "can't live without" the doctrine because it has, in the course of nearly 2000 years, become so entrenched within Christianity that removing it at this stage could be fatal to the host.
To Pray… or to Sacrifice a Goat?
"Let me be succinct and clear: prayer is a useless exercise, undertaken by those who, in a fit of childish delusion, believe they can effect change in the real world by falling to their knees and murmuring to themselves. These people, oftentimes adults who have been properly educated and who can function in day-to-day society quite serviceably, are under the distinctly infantile impression that muttering under their breath can affect the outcome of some circumstance in which they have a stake, emotional or otherwise."
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Cornerback
"One huge problem I have with football (one that certainly crops up elsewhere in our society) is the preponderance of players and coaches who continually invoke the Almighty as a major force in their lives, and in the progress of their careers. Certainly if they're hell-bent, so to speak, on deluding themselves about the nature of the universe and their place in it, that's their own affair. But at the start of the 2009 season, I noticed yet another reminder about the level many football players (and other athletes, to be sure) are willing to take this nonsense to."
Religious Influence on Public Decision-Making
Given the overwhelming majority people of faith have in holding positions of leadership in this country, we must not fear to ask: what role does the willingness to treat unsubstantiated and even absurd suppositions that haven't a shred of evidence to support them as unassailable facts play in their decision-making process? And what role should it play?
Vatican Searches for E.T. and Other Signs of Alien Life
The beginning of the end of Jesus as we knew him: the Vatican looks to heavens for signs of alien life.
The Domestication of God
No documents tell the how, when and where of events of the Neolithic period, yet many of the artifacts that we use today were invented then, as were such technologies as the husbandry of plants and animals. So also did the worship of a god begin within the walls of settlements. The manner in which such worship occurred and then spread reveals patterns of thinking that have survived even to this day. Now—at the outset of the Nuclear Era—a new dimension in thought is needed.
The Shroud of Turin: The Great Gothic Art Fraud — Because If It’s Real the Brain of Jesus Was the Size of a Protohuman’s!
This note is intended to describe why, from an artistic and anatomical perspective, the shroud image is an embarrassingly obvious fraud committed by a Gothic artist following the standard conventions of his time. The artistic errors are so severe that it is impossible for the shroud to record the image of an actual human body—unless it was a very seriously pathological person with a brain the size of a Homo erectus.
The Value of Atheism
Supposing that atheism is true, is it important to defend its truth? This paper emphatically answers in the affirmative. It argues that if atheism is rationally held to be true, that alone is sufficient reason to defend it, for truth and rational belief are intrinsic goods, and it is generally noble to try to change others' minds when they seem to hold false beliefs. In addition, it considers a number of secondary, supplementary reasons for defending atheism. These range from fighting religiously motivated mistreatment, developing beneficial public policies, redirecting resources going to religious institutions to benefit those in need, understanding our place in the world, and fostering thinking freely as rational and autonomous beings, among other things. It wraps up by considering whether anything indispensable to the good life is lost when we abandon traditional theistic belief for atheism, concluding that the purported benefits of theistic belief over atheism typically evaporate on closer inspection.
Is Consciousness Emergent? A Test to Prove It
The question is, how does consciousness arise in biological systems? There are at least two theories that account for consciousness. One is the idea that something is added to the body—an élan vital, a soul, or an independent mind (mind/body dualism). The other idea is that complexity (i.e., consciousness) emerges from the interactions of simple parts. Is there a way to choose one of these as being correct? Yes, by hypothesizing an emergent consciousness in a system that is not yet conscious—the computer. If we hypothesize that consciousness will emerge in a computer, given enough component parts, we can determine by rigorous testing if the hypothesis is proved. If the test proves that consciousness emerges in a computer, we will have proved that a soul is not necessary for consciousness—neither in computers nor in humans.
Julian Jaynes’ Theory of the Evolution of Human Consciousness
Julian Jaynes was one of the original psychologists, philosophers, and scholars, of the 20th century. While Charles Darwin connected human consciousness with biological unconscious, Sigmund Freud with psychological unconscious, and Karl Marx with social unconscious, Jaynes connected evolution of human consciousness with the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the Half God/Half Human mind. Although his theory did not become as popular as other theories it is nevertheless worthy of serious consideration.
A Chat with Noah
"Last week I dreamt I had died and surprisingly gone to Heaven. St. Peter's computer system had developed a glitch and although our Boarding Passes on the Shuttle that took us there had a very different destination printed on them, we tore them all up as we passed the moon and partied the rest of the way..."
An Analysis of Richard Swinburne’s The Existence of God
On first appearance, Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God offers a highly structured, coherent, and rigorous argument for God's existence grounded in Bayes' theorem, inductive reasoning, confirmation theory, the intrinsic probability of simple hypotheses, substance dualism, and moral realism. But Gabe Czobel questions both the rigor of Swinburne's overall argument, and whether it really yields the conclusion that Swinburne expects the reader to reach. An unsympathetic reader would have difficulty overlooking its major structural flaws, particularly where the argument does not live up to its promise of being grounded in premises undisputed by all. Moreover, it only promises a threadbare deity who is almost robotic in nature, and who offers little assurance of benefit to his adherents in this life or any other.
A Review of Gregory Dawes’ Theism and Explanation
In Theism and Explanation, Gregory Dawes tries to get to the bottom of some very important questions: Could a theistic explanation ever, even in principle, be a good explanation for anything? What would a successful theistic explanation look like? How strong could a theistic explanation be?