Modern Library

In this article National Center for Science Education deputy director Glenn Branch reviews Graham Oppy's scholarly and meticulous, yet still accessible, Naturalism and Religion. After defining naturalism as the thesis that all causal entities and causal powers are natural, and that the best means for identifying those entities and powers is the scientific method, Oppy goes on to define a religion as a belief system that, among other things, is committed to the existence of non-natural causal entities and/or powers, and thus is incompatible with naturalism. As might be expected, Oppy argues that naturalistic big pictures balance the virtues of scientific theories best given all of the available evidence. At mid-way Oppy assesses well-known theistic arguments against naturalism from Alvin Plantinga and Michael Rea and then goes on to consider general Thomistic critiques. The book then turns to the extent to which science does, and does not, conflict with religion. After assessing a number of arguments against the explanatory power of naturalism, the final chapter highlights the combination of the minimal ontological commitments and great explanatory power of naturalism: we know that natural causal entities and powers exist, but have little evidential reason to posit the existence of anything more.

What is faith, atheism, and agnosticism? How should these words be understood? Why is this debate important? Who is right, and why does it matter? In this essay John Loftus tackles these issues, offering insights that are sure to enlighten us all.

In this essay John Loftus explores the most important questions regarding the belief that the 'Virgin Mary' truly was the mother of God's son. In short, he argues that no virgin ever gave birth to a son of God, citing sources for those who want an even longer argument. The argument begins by exploring a noteworthy Christian sect that questions whether, in fact, Mary was indeed a virgin, and whether God had a body through which conception could be achieved. The questions and issues that he goes on to explore should challenge what Christians believe about God, Mary, the Gospels, and their entire faith.

In the last quarter of 2024 four articles on survival after death were published online ahead of print in the International Review of Psychiatry. Two of these included gratuitous attempts to discredit the work of a well-known survival critic. After correcting these misrepresentations, in this response Keith Augustine lays out how those who appeal to survival research to support their beliefs bungle their purportedly scientific assessments of the evidence concerning whether or not individual human minds survive death in a discarnate state (without a normal physical body). The response also lays out why the still-common arguments that the late eminent thanatologist Robert Kastenbaum offered in favor of a discarnate afterlife are fallacious. It canvasses erroneous tropes about discovering white crows and the supposed impossibility of proving negatives, how scientific facts are established as highly probable, how psychical research is grounded on fallacious arguments from ignorance, and when all else fails, how survival researchers resort to psychologizing their critics rather than address their critics' arguments. Their collective failure to engage their critics' actual arguments raises the issue of whether survival proponents are able to adequately answer them—and if not, why not. Augustine submits that they are unable to answer their critics because the scientific evidence against their afterlife beliefs is incredibly strong.

Evidentialists typically argue that there is something unfair about "presuppositions" against miracles and that we should investigate the alleged evidence for their occurrence. But in this paper Robert G. Miller points out that legal rules do not exclude evidence only after a complete investigation proves that such evidence could never be factual. Rather, evidentiary rules exclude entire categories of evidence that the law considers to be too unreliable to support a verdict. Furthermore, religious historians' two requirements for historical evidence of a miracle—the absence of a plausible natural explanation for an event and the occurrence of that event in a historical "context charged with religious significance"—amount to an argument from ignorance combined with an appeal to a historical context that is irrelevant to how truth-conducive a claim may be. Little wonder that supposed evidence of miracles has not been admissible in court since the Salem witch trials.

Gary Habermas pioneered the "minimal facts approach" (MFA) to proving the resurrection of Jesus. Habermas asserts that a few facts accepted by even skeptical scholars are enough to substantiate the Resurrection's occurrence. Retired attorney Robert G. Miller argues that the "facts" cited by Habermas are actually opinions, and that Habermas misrepresents those opinions. Miller argues that commonsense rules of evidence developed by courts over centuries of deciding real-world issues provide a better way of evaluating the evidence claimed for the Resurrection.

In this short online book, Vito Lear presents a primer that outlines questions, issues, and evidence illustrating that Christianity has failed to meet its burden to prove its extraordinary claim to have the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Lear’s concise inquiry focuses on three core issues: Are the fundamental claims of Christianity consistent with reason and morality? Is Christianity’s sacred text, the Bible, historically reliable? And since its advent, has Christianity overall made the world a better place, or a worse one? Lear argues that these questions should be widely asked, but are rarely considered by the general population in the predominately Christian culture of the United States.

In Part C of a three-part critical review of Robyn Faith Walsh's The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, John MacDonald provides a literary application and defense of Walsh's hypothesis that the New Testament is not, as is usually thought, the product of literate spokespersons conveying the oral tradition of their community, but rather is birthed out of networks of elite Greco-Roman-Jewish writers in dialogue with one another, not out of downtrodden illiterate peasants. MacDonald aims to show that Walsh's approach makes good sense of the evidence, such as pervasive intertextual haggadic midrash (Jewish) and mimesis (Greek) going on in writing the Gospels, which seems less likely on the "oral tradition of the community" hypothesis. Walsh's critique of the community oral tradition model is important because that model is what bridges the gap from the opaque period of Jesus' life and death in the 30s through Paul (who is silent on the details of Jesus' life) to the destruction of the Temple in the 70s, when Mark's gospel appears. A few bare details aside, without this chain of sources, reconstruction of the events of Jesus' life is essentially impossible. In this third article, MacDonald takes up the question of Paul and shows how Paul thinks of Jesus as the law incarnate/embodied/personified, and how this is rooted in ancient philosophy as well as Jewish thought.

In Part B of a three-part critical review of Robyn Faith Walsh's The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, John MacDonald provides a literary application and defense of Walsh's hypothesis that the Gospels are not, as is usually thought, the product of literate spokespersons conveying the oral tradition of their community, but rather are birthed out of networks of elite Greco-Roman-Jewish writers in dialogue with one another, not downtrodden illiterate peasants. MacDonald aims to show that Walsh's approach makes good sense of the evidence, such as pervasive intertextual haggadic midrash (Jewish) and mimesis (Greek) going on in writing the Gospels, which seems less likely on the "oral tradition of the community" hypothesis. Walsh's critique of the community oral tradition model is important because that model is what bridges the gap from the opaque period of Jesus' life and death in the 30s through Paul (who is silent on the details of Jesus' life) to the destruction of the Temple in the 70s, when Mark's gospel appears. A few bare details aside, without this chain of sources, reconstruction of the events of Jesus' life is essentially impossible. In this second article, MacDonald shows how the narrative of the arrest and death of Jesus serves a theological agenda, not a historical one. Moreover, MacDonald addresses the problematic nature of the hypothetical lost Q source (the material common to Matthew and Luke that did not come from Mark), such as how McGrath's attempt to derive the relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus from Q is flawed.

In Part A of a three-part critical review of Robyn Faith Walsh's The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture, John MacDonald provides a literary application and defense of Walsh’s hypothesis that the Gospels are not, as is usually thought, the product of literate spokespersons conveying the oral tradition of their community, but rather are birthed out of networks of elite Greco-Roman-Jewish writers in dialogue with one another, not downtrodden illiterate peasants. MacDonald aims to show that Walsh's approach makes good sense of the evidence, such as pervasive intertextual haggadic midrash (Jewish) and mimesis (Greek) going on in writing the Gospels, which seems less likely on the “oral tradition of the community” hypothesis. Walsh's critique of the community oral tradition model is important because that model is what bridges the gap from the opaque period of Jesus’ life and death in the 30s through Paul (who is silent on the details of Jesus’ life) to the destruction of the Temple in the 70s, when Mark's gospel appears. A few bare details aside, without this chain of sources, reconstruction of the events of Jesus' life is essentially impossible.

Hume is widely regarded as the most important English-speaking philosopher in history. He wrote significant works on empiricism, epistemology, and philosophy of religion. In the latter Hume offered several powerful arguments against miracles in section 10 ("of Miracles") of his seminal book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In this paper, John W. Loftus defends Hume against some of the most important objections to his critique of the rationality of belief in miracles.

Arguments from reason are philosophical arguments against naturalism that claim that if we held the human mind to be a physical entity, then our thinking processes would be causally determined, mechanical ones, which would then make them unreliable as guides to objective truth. Our ability to grasp the ground-consequence relation couldn't be a material-causal power, the argument goes, but should instead be explained as the working of some sort of immaterial, spiritual entity (i.e., God, or a soul/spirit created by God). In this article, Miklós Szalai critiques this argument as it has been put forth by C. S. Lewis, Victor Reppert, Darek Barefoot, and others, ultimately defending a naturalistic analysis of the concepts of representation, truth, and inference.

In this paper Evan Fales considers whether (religious) faith has any role to play in conferring positive epistemic status to (especially religious) beliefs. He outlines several conceptions of faith that have been historically important within Western religious traditions. He then considers what role faith might be supposed to play, so understood, within the framework of internalist and externalist accounts of knowledge. His general conclusion is that, insofar as faith itself is a justified epistemic attitude, it requires justification and acquires that justification only through the regular faculties for contingent truths: sense perception and reason. Fales also argues that the operations of our cognitive faculties in arriving at epistemic judgments on matters of substance are sufficiently complex, subtle, and often temporally prolonged, to make it exceptionally difficult to reconstruct the cognitive process and to judge whether it meets standards of rationality.

In The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small, Trent Dougherty claims that animal suffering is a logically necessary part of a world that contains the greatest goods—expression of the saintly virtues. He claims that even animal pain will be defeated insofar as animals will be resurrected as persons (think of the talking animals of C. S. Lewis' Narnia) who will come to embrace their role (including their suffering) in the drama of creation. Dougherty claims that if he can show that his saint-making theodicy makes the existence of animal pain unsurprising given the existence of God, and if he can show that his theodicy doesn't reduce the prior probability of God's existence, then he will "screen off" the disconfirmatory power that the existence of evil bears on the existence of God. In this review, Liz Goodnick deftly questions Dougherty's reasoning, particularly since the saintly virtues are only appropriate responses to a world that contains the kinds and as much suffering as this world does in the first place, and independently may not be worth that tremendous cost.

Animism—the widespread belief among indigenous groups around the world that natural features like plants, rivers, rocks, and mountains are alive and animated by anthropomorphic spirits—is widely considered to be the oldest form of religion. Following the work of Justin Barrett, Stewart Guthrie, and others, the human propensity to attribute humanlike traits to natural objects is a plausible extension of an evolutionarily adaptive hyperactive agency detection device ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom. After all, the false positive detection of an imaginary predator is much less costly to survival and reproduction than the false negative dismissal of a real one. In this essay journalist Sam Woolfe argues that a "soft animist" need not posit that personhood permeates the natural world in order to preserve the essential animistic sense of responsibility to respect and protect nature in all of its aliveness. In this sense animism can signify not a particular metaphysical viewpoint, but rather the beneficent relationship to nature that such a viewpoint has traditionally inspired.

Christian apologists have published dozens of books and articles during the last four centuries claiming that they can prove the resurrection of Jesus using legal standards of evidence. Retired attorney Robert G. Miller sought an attorney who would argue in support of the Resurrection in a format closer to a real adversarial process in court, but could not find a single lawyer who would even discuss the possibility of facing an actual opponent. In this unopposed brief, Miller thus explains three independent reasons why apologists cannot prove Jesus' resurrection by legal principles, and then goes on to critique legal apologists' standard arguments for the Resurrection. Miller seeks someone willing to respond to this brief.

During a mystical experience, one's awareness of the external world is greatly reduced and the focus is centered on the interior and spiritual awareness of an ostensibly divine presence, interpreted as God in the monotheistic traditions. Such experiences can be felt by many to be confirmation of a supernatural reality. Yet it is worth emphasizing that not everyone will eschew a naturalistic view of the world following such experiences. In this article Sam Woolfe explores the idea of "secular ecstasy," an ecstatic experience of the "divine" without a belief in a mind-independent divinity—a meeting with a God who ceases to exist when the experience is finished. Woolfe argues that this marrying of a secular or atheistic worldview with mystical states is in no way contradictory, and that by respecting and integrating these aspects of secular ecstasy, an individual can deepen the sense of well-being felt in everyday life.

The two-fold aim of the apologetic volume True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism is counter the work of the so-called new atheists and to offer a defense of the reasonableness of Christianity. The volume canvasses the problem of religious diversity, the ostensible conflict between science and religion, naturalism in science, the relationship between religion and morality, and the reliability of and morally problematic aspects of the Bible. While the contributors have no difficulty countering the more sweeping claims and poorly informed criticisms sometimes made by the new atheists, they also display an uncharitable unwillingness to admit that atheistic arguments have any merits at all. In particular, there is a little serious engagement with the best atheist thinkers, which the contributors acknowledge but do nothing to correct. The end result is a one-sided discussion concentrating on easy targets rather than more sophisticated arguments. The volume's defense of Christianity, on the other hand, raises a dilemma: If there were good reasoned arguments for Christian beliefs, then faith would be unnecessary for belief; and if faith gave answers to questions that reason leaves untouched, atheists would be right to ask how Christians can know that their beliefs to be true. If not based on reason, then what is faith based upon? One possibility is that the only permissible use of reason is to better understand and defend what Christians already believe. But then any article of faith incompatible with reason would require rejecting the deliverances of reason, leading to a conflict between science and religion. And the restriction on Christians to follow the dictates of reason only when they lend support to the faith looks like dogmatism, one traditionally—but problematically—put forward as a virtue by the faithful.

For more than 30 years, Alvin Plantinga has argued that the guiding hand of the Christian God was necessary for evolution by natural selection to produce reliable human cognitive faculties that produce a majority of true beliefs. This paper focuses on two of the many problems with Plantinga's argument. First, Plantinga's explication of what it means for "our cognitive faculties" and "beliefs" to be "reliable" is woefully inadequate in scientific terms. Second, even if we give Plantinga's shaky cognitive science the benefit of the doubt, my analysis of Plantinga's selective theism reveals that his argument is circular. I discuss a mainstream version of Christian theism that leads to a conclusion about the expected reliability of our cognitive faculties under theism that is the opposite of Plantinga's, undermining his claim of a "deep concord" between theism and science.

In his Secular Web article "No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese," Keith Parsons had argued that the explanatory success of science makes belief in God logically unnecessary in the Laplacian sense of "I have no need of the hypothesis." In "Job Opening: Creator of the Universe—A Reply to Keith Parsons," Paul Herrick responded that, in principle, theism cannot be rendered explanatorily powerless by the progress of science. In this response to Herrick's reply, Parsons thoroughly dismantles Herrick's cosmological argument for the existence of God piece by piece, with particular emphasis on Herrick's claim that God created our universe out of pure love.

Among secular rationalists, the term spirituality is often criticized as being vague or meaningless at best, or pseudoscientific at worst. But secularists can acknowledge a rational middle ground between these two extremes. Building upon eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow's lesser-known concept of "self-transcendence" atop his more famous original hierarchy of needs (whose pinnacle is self-actualization), Sam Woolfe weaves concepts from humanistic psychology and the philosophy of psychedelics to advance a concept of spirituality grounded in the realization of our innate capacities within awe-inspiring experiences that situate us fully in the present moment and allow us to transcend our normal personal identity in ways that lead to meaningful improvements to our well-being and life satisfaction. A metaphysical naturalist can thus reasonably understand the process of transcending limitations for the sake of oneself and others as fundamental to leading an authentic spiritual life without any need to posit the existence of supernatural entities, forces, or realms.

In a 2022 critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies essay competition on the "best" evidence for life after death ("the survival of human consciousness") and in replies to two commentaries on it, Keith Augustine made passing reference to the parallels between the arguments provided by survival researchers—psychical researchers ostensibly investigating evidence for an afterlife using scientific best practices—and the well-worn fallacies repeatedly committed by creationists and other Christian apologists. In this essay, Augustine highlights several parallel fallacious arguments found among both those at the forefront of "scientific" research into an afterlife and those engaged in Christian apologetics.

Does the Christian worldview provide a suitable guide to human psychology? The late counselor Lawrence J. Crabb, Jr. thought so, inspiring his bestselling counseling text Effective Biblical Counseling, first published in 1977 and reprinted in 2013, all in all selling over 200,000 copies. In this essay Timothy Chambers outlines Crabb's Bible-based model of how the human mind works, shining a light on the broader Christian view of "fallen" human psychology that it represents. Chambers then subjects this model to critical scrutiny, noting both the ways in which it echos more mainstream theories in psychotherapy and deviates from them and related sciences (such as when Crabb seems to suggest that non-Christians' moral development is arrested at a self-centered stage). This central theme throughout the book delineates what Crabb takes to be essential psychological differences between "saved" Christians and "lost" non-Christians. As one might imagine, nonbelievers are characterized as enslaved to sin, self-serving, and self-glorifying in multiple places. In addition to substantial questions about Crabb's model's testability, the model is out of step with contemporary psychology in a number of places, particularly concerning child development, human altruism, neurobiology, and psychopharmacology.

Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has great potential to resolve existential concerns underlying much psychological distress, having produced reduced death anxiety in terminally ill patients, the most meaningful experiences of patients' lives, and a greater sense of connection to nature, one's own emotions, and other people. In this essay Sam Woolfe concentrates on the potential of psychedelics to alleviate death anxiety since that existential concern has the most propensity to instill terror, as evidenced by (among other things) philosophical and theological systems constructed to nullify it. Why are patients able to overcome their fear of death during a psychedelic experience? While psychedelics can radically change people's metaphysical beliefs to include belief in an immaterial soul and supernatural realms and entities, they can also produce a heightened sense of spirituality that's grounded in the natural world alone by expanding a person's sense of connection to community, society, the planet, and the universe. Since this enlarged self is not completely annihilated by death even on naturalism, psychedelic experiences can open people up to seeing death as nothing to fear as a final Epicurean release from suffering.

In The Scout Mindset, Rationally Speaking podcaster Julia Galef provides a unique roadmap for avoiding errors grounded in the motivation for one's reasoning. Using a military metaphor, she describes two mindsets in approaching logical propositions, that of the soldier and that of the scout. Most of us default to a soldier mindset, questioning whether we have to assent to propositions that we dislike, and asking whether we are permitted to assent to ones that we favor. A scout mindset is simply concerned with determining whether or not a proposition is true, however, as when vetting the credibility of military intelligence. Although the soldier mindset boosts self-esteem, morale, and camaraderie, the scout mindset is essential to making good judgment calls. And while most people identify with a scout mindset, more often than not their behavior indicates something else. In this review, Mike Smith notes that this is where Galef's approach to critical thinking is distinctive in an otherwise saturated genre: Galef provides a number of external criteria and thought experiments for assessing the degrees to which a person really takes on a scout mindset. With this valuable framework as her background, Galef makes a persuasive case that the degree to which one exhibits a scout mindset is more of a matter of track record than attitude, and is contingent on the ability to imagine alternative perspectives as real possibilities. The Scout Mindset contains a lot of useful information for having productive conversations online, fostering an open mind, or communicating across different levels of understanding. This book is top of the line for those looking to improve the clarity of their thought.

In this article John MacDonald examines the Christ myth theory and its difficulties. A number of flaws are pointed out with the theory. One focus is the moral influence interpretation of Jesus' death, as opposed to the penal substitution/sin debt model that mythicism demands. Learning the Jesus story is imputing guilt, the opposite of Aristotelian purging catharsis. This is a substantial problem for mythicism. A celestial Christ who was never on Earth and was killed in outer space by sky demons can't inspire such guilt, and so mythicism isn't an effective interpretive model—among other problems. One must ask: Does the kind of theology being produced make more sense from a general historicist framework, or a mythicist one? Jesus' horrific torture and abuse points to a historical Jesus with immolated goat and scapegoat Yom Kippur theology, rather than a mythical one. There is something about the cross that goes beyond doing away with sin so that man and God can be reconciled.

Does God Exist? (2002) Imran Aijaz’s Second Rebuttal: Reply to Dr. Cooke’s Criticisms of Theism I am grateful to Dr. Cooke for his criticisms of the arguments I gave in favour of theism. Nothing in his critique, however, constitutes a serious rebuttal to any of them, as I shall now argue. (1) Circularity? Dr. Cooke […]

Many people believe that something about our individual minds—a soul, if you will—lives on even after the brain has disintegrated. Ultimately, they see the mind as a function of a soul that survives death, rather than as a function of a brain. But if a nonmaterial soul is really the seat of the mind, why do you even need a brain? What is left for the brain to do? Some propose that the brain is simply an interface to the body. But science has shown that it is the brain that is in charge. In this article, Merle Hertzler lays out the evidence that we think with our brains, not with immaterial souls. And the possibility of bodily resurrection doesn't fare much better. So we need to make the most of the one life that we know for sure exists because odds are, that's the only life that any of us are going to get.

The fear of death has been a major struggle for human beings all throughout history, and we have found a variety of ways to cope with this uncomfortable fact. Our world religions are man-made institutions designed to give comfort from this fear in the form of purpose, meaning, and life that transcend death. Embracing these realizations, John Shelby Spong's Eternal Life: A New Vision argues for the necessity of abandoning traditional theistic religion for the adoption of a more humanist, life-centered perspective. Nevertheless, Spong's labels for numerous concepts are often pointless and sometimes even confused. If the divine is fully experiencing the human, why call it the divine in the first place? What stands to be gained from calling the totality of human experience, and the sense of transcendent unity, God? Carr sees this as merely an attempt to ease the transition out of a system which is already in the process of collapsing.

The soul-making theodicy seeks to explain how belief in the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good God is compatible with the evil, pain, and suffering that we experience in our world. The theodicy purports to meet nontheists' arguments from evil by articulating a divine plan in which the occurrence of evil is necessary for enabling the greater good of the character-building of free moral agents. Many philosophers of religion have leveled strong objections against this theodicy, and theistic philosopher Clement Dore has responded to them. In this essay, Leslie Allan questions the effectiveness of Dore's counterarguments to two key objections to the soul-making theodicy.