Ten Ways to Be an Atheist Activist
So you've come to understand that you are an atheist. Now what? To the uninformed, it might seem that there isn't much to do as an atheist. Well, in fact there is quite a bit to do as an atheist that encourages community, support for church/state separation issues, and the national understanding of atheism.
Darwin’s Conflict with His Wife and God
Darwin was clear in his heart and mind that man was an evolved ape rather than a fallen angel and that life could be understood without divine revelations, but as far as his wife's feelings were concerned he could not change her mind and heart, and had to live with that conflict and sadness all his life. The pain he experienced is evident from the note that was found at the bottom of his wife's letter.
The Case Against Brigham Young University
"Since leaving the LDS religion, my eyes have been opened to the horrific effect Mormonism has had on Utah's culture. Brigham Young University is a case-study of how pervasive this religion's effect has been, even in what should be an institution of higher learning."
Despair, Optimism, and Rebellion
In this contribution to an American Philosophical Association symposium on "God, Death, and the Meaning of Life," Evan Fales considers three responses to loss of faith in the Christian God: despair, optimism, and rebellion. Western culture is permeated by belief in an afterlife on religious grounds, shaping these responses in particularly anxious ways. Fales considers both how atheists can respond to the question of the meaning of life, and, in what is surely a surprising direction for some, whether Christianity even has the resources to provide meaning through doctrines as problematic as requiring another to pay for your own sins. In July 2007 Fales updated this paper for the Secular Web by expanding his discussion of reasons to doubt the moral acceptability of another person (such as Jesus) absolving individuals of responsibility for their sins (or wrongdoings) through sacrifice, substitution, or by serving as a moral exemplar.
Reason in Politics: A Review of Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason
"I picked up Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Excitement, because it was a case of a prominent public figure delivering a much-needed defense of reason in the public square. Anxiety, because the figure was, well... a politician."
Review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel
"In this profoundly affecting memoir, Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, and Kenya, to her intellectual awakening and activism in the Netherlands, and her current life under armed guard in the West" (book description).
"It is quite interesting. It makes a useful addition to the growing literature critiquing Islam, and emphasizing the need to reform its narrow and restrictive approach to life" (Mohammad Gill).
"It is quite interesting. It makes a useful addition to the growing literature critiquing Islam, and emphasizing the need to reform its narrow and restrictive approach to life" (Mohammad Gill).
Introduction to Section One: Mind and Will (Great Debate)
What sort of entity is the human mind? Also, what is freedom of the will, and do human beings have such freedom? Determining the correct answers to these questions is crucial for determining which of naturalism and theism is more credible.
An Argument from Consciousness and Free Will
Most naturalists insist that there is no room for purpose or teleology in the universe. They hold that the origin and evolution of the universe was governed by blind processes, not by the conception of a goal or end. By contrast, theists see the contingent cosmos as explicable in terms of a conscious, purposive, and necessary divine reality. We shall argue that the very existence and nature of free will, purposive explanations, conscious minds, and the contingency of the cosmos are more reasonable given theism than given naturalism.
Objections to Melnyk’s Case for Physicalism
According to physicalism, what we ordinarily take to be a causally undetermined mental action is both caused and determined. But if physicalism is true, important elements of the first-person point of view are mistaken: Andrew Melnyk's choice to write his paper is not ultimately and irreducibly explained by a purpose, but by the nonpurposive causes of events in his brain. Physicalism implies that at bottom there are not purposive and causal explanations, but simply causal ones, and that there are not free and determined events, but only determined ones. Given these implications, why think that physicalism is true?
Reply to Melnyk’s Objections
Unlike naturalists, theists can provide a good explanation of the emergence of consciousness because their worldview offers an explanatory framework in which the goodness of conscious life and libertarian free will provides the fundamental reason why conscious, free subjects exist. Contrary to Andrew Melnyk, human choices can only be explained in terms of purposes or reasons for acting, and they do not have causes. In addition, conscious states are intrinsically nonphysical and not made up of parts, while physical explanations of the intrinsic natures of things are typically couched in terms of part-whole compositional relationships.
General Introduction and Acknowledgements (Great Debate)
The Great Debate, God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence, aims to bring together nine distinguished philosophers in a series of four debates, each with a different focus on evidence for and against naturalism and theism. The first debate addresses evidence concerning the nature of the mind and the will as it relates to the truth of naturalism and theism. The second debate introduces an argument from evil informed by evolutionary biology and considers whether evolutionary naturalism is self-defeating. The third debate appeals to the physical sciences, alternatively providing a cosmological argument against theism on the one hand and considering design arguments against naturalism on the other. The final debate revolves around why, if God exists, he remains hidden from so many people, and whether we should believe in God for practical reasons even in the absence of compelling evidence for his existence.
God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence
(2007-2008) Edited and with Introductions by Paul Draper General Introduction and Acknowledgements Section One: Mind and Will Introduction to Section One Meet the Authors: Andrew Melnyk, Stewart Goetz, and Charles Taliaferro Melnyk’s Argument A Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind Goetz & Taliaferro’s Objections Objections to Melnyk’s Case for Physicalism Melnyk’s Reply Physicalism and […]
A Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind
In this chapter, I describe evidence for the view that the human mind is a physical entity, in much the same way in which the human digestive system or the human immune system are physical entities. The first section characterizes this view more fully. The second section explains the evidential relevance of physicalism about the mind to theism. The third section sketches two kinds of evidence that support physicalism about the human mind, while the final section considers an antiphysicalist response to the reasoning of the previous section.
Physicalism and the First-Person Point of View: A Reply to Taliaferro and Goetz
In "A Case for Physicalism about the Human Mind," I tried to assemble positive evidence that physicalism about human mentality is true, while insisting that no aspect of human behavior makes it necessary to adopt any kind of dualism about human mentality. In their reply, Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz fail to engage my positive case for physicalism, and offer no examples of human behavior that can only be explained by some kind of dualism. Instead, they primarily object that my paper overlooks features of human mentality purportedly incompatible with physicalism and accessible only from "the first-person point of view," such as free choice and reasons for acting. My response focuses on this objection alone.
Naturalism, Free Choices, and Conscious Experiences
Charles Taliaferro and Stewart Goetz offer two main objections to a certain kind of naturalism. First, naturalism concedes the legitimacy of purposeful explanation but conceives of it as a special kind of causal explanation, namely one that cites the wants (or purposes) and beliefs of an agent. But Taliaferro and Goetz object that some explanations--such as the explanations of free choices--are irreducibly purposeful. I argue that our everyday choices provide little if any evidence for fundamentally purposeful (noncausal) explanations. Second, Taliaferro and Goetz argue that the existence of a universe containing nonphysical conscious states requires a fundamentally purposeful explanation. But I argue that this does not follow even if one grants the questionable assumption that conscious states are physically irreducible.
Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion
"I often find myself humbly suggesting that it is possible to raise children every bit as ethical, caring, loving, humane, inspired and well-adjusted without religion as with it. I don't believe parenting without religion is merely "as good" as parenting with it--I think it is immeasurably better. I think it blows the doors off religious parenting in every respect--powerful inquiry, reasoned ethics, ecstatic inspiration, cosmic humility and profound humanity. No need to waste time raining reason on the deaf ears of the faithful. Let the baby have his bottle. Our time is better spent clearing a space for the rest of us to dance with our children."
The Koran Unveiled
Although radical Islam is spreading, not much is known in Western countries about the Koran, and there seems to be an unwillingness to have a closer look at the book. Yet without this, informed discussion is impossible, and what debate does take place is no more than an exchange of opinion and ignorance. Amongst other things, the Koran is said to call for holy war and to sanction domestic violence. But when asked about this, Muslims and Western apologists flatly deny this. They maintain that the Koran does not preach violence, only compassion and justice (and one should well ask whose justice)--yet the Koran does not support their claims. One cannot rebut them without precise quotes. I have gone through the Koran and precisely referenced some very disturbing passages to bring these issues out into the open and to stimulate much-needed discussion, issues raised which need to be addressed openly and publicly, in the West and in Muslim countries alike.
A Response to Richard Carrier’s Review of C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea
C. S. Lewis's argument from reason (AfR) claims that the process of inference by which consideration of premises causes us to adopt a conclusion cannot be coherently conceived of in terms of physical cause-and-effect alone. In C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea, Victor Reppert maintains that the argument still poses a strong challenge to naturalism. However, Richard Carrier has attempted to refute Reppert's version of the AfR by invoking developments in cognitive science and computational theory. In this essay Darek Barefoot argues that advances in cognitive science do not affect the AfR since there is an absolute conceptual divide between rational mental causes and physical computational ones. Furthermore, if the AfR is successful, it reveals that rationality is fundamental to the universe, not simply a by-product of physical cause-and-effect; and this, in turn, is readily explicable on theism, but problematic for naturalism.
The Ten Commandments Are Not Part of Our Secular Legal Heritage
"Controversies over the display of the Ten Commandments on public property generally do not focus on religious issues. More often, the justification is based on the supposed role of the Ten Commandments in the secular development of Western, and specifically American, legal principles. But did the Ten Commandments really play any role in the founding principles of our legal system? The obvious conclusion is that the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible do not form any part of our Western legal heritage."
The Culture of Atheism
In Atheism in the Third Millennium, Kim Walker argues that atheism would benefit from having its own culture, its own songs, stories, heroes, celebrations, rituals, sanctuaries, symbols and monuments reflecting the atheist lifestyle. Walker says that a "lack of cultural depth" holds atheists back, despite the intellectual merits of atheism itself. Kuchar thinks this view of atheism rests on some confusions, that whether a culture is called atheistic isn't nearly as important as whether the culture is in fact a counterpart of atheism.
God Is a Metaphor
"Scriptures were written in the context of a particular preexisting language and culture; only if we appreciate those linguistic and cultural traditions can we understand their scriptures as part of their mythology. I think that when humanity reaches the stage of mental growth and cultural evolution when most people can understand scriptures as folklore and not as divine revelations, can view them as mythology rather than stories, and can differentiate facts from fiction, there might be more wisdom and peace and fewer conflicts and holy wars in this world."
The Price of Dissent
The Left, unashamedly, allies itself with Islamists in North America in the name of politically correct cultural relativism that says that the social and moral values of immigrants should be interpreted in the terms of the culture they have migrated from. It is quite ironic that the Left that is in constant struggle against the Christian Right on issues like abortion, gay marriage, teaching evolution in public schools, etc. is engaged in this unholy alliance with Islamists who have an identical social agenda as the Christian Right.
Review of Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Unfortunately, the title of the book is inappropriate. The title implies that god exists and contends that he is not great. Greatness of an object can only be considered and discussed when the object actually exists. Although God Is Not Great contains an abundance of valuable information pertinent to the author's main thesis, unfortunately it is commingled with other irrelevant verbiage. - Mohammad Gill
Answering Michael Coren’s “Answering Christianity Haters”
Michael Coren recently wrote an Easter column for the Toronto Sun entitled "Answering Christianity Haters." In the column he gives short responses to some typical criticisms of Christianity. I go through these criticisms and his responses to show that the issues aren't nearly so pat as Coren wants his readers to think.
Review of Sam Harris’ The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Sam Harris didn't write his book The End of Faith with the sense of purpose as did Richard Dawkins who, when he wrote his book The God Delusion, proclaimed, "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down." No such claim is made by Harris about The End of Faith, yet The End of Faith might well change many readers into skeptics of religion.
- Mohammad Gill
- Mohammad Gill
Review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion
"If Richard Dawkins is right, then everything he concludes is suspect. If 'memes' are ferociously replicating 'selfish-genes' in the social pool, tantamount to a computer virus, then disbelief in God may also be the result of aberrant memeplexes."
Review of Science and Religion: Are They Compatible (ed. Paul Kurtz)
"Science and Religion: Are They Compatible covers a vast terrain, including almost every field of human epistemology. All in all, it is valuable both for its own sake and as a useful reference covering the incompatibility between science and religion."
Review of Victor J. Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis
"Dr. Stenger's learning is vast and he expresses his thoughts with enormous clarity, making them accessible to a large audience. He is a master communicator. One will not find a better book on the scientific evidence for atheism."
About Intercessory Prayer: A Proposal… Maybe
"Let's see a real test put before the immovable object; the irresistible force; the ultimate omniscience, the omnipotent, omnipresent supremacy of all that the believers in a supernatural being endow that Master Architect with."