Modern Library

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.

When one normally thinks of reincarnation, one has in mind a caricature, an oversimplification. Modern-day science can be marshaled in to lend support to a kind of reincarnation. The combination of traits that make you you, no matter how multifarious, are finite. This implies that given a long enough time, some sentient being, whether Homo sapiens sapiens or something very similar to our own species, will come to believe in the same you that you believe constitutes you. This, to my mind, is how naturalism makes room for "reincarnation." Thus naturalists should shun the habit of dismissing an idea because it is religious or apparently supernatural. However, while such a naturalistic conception of reincarnation is logically coherent, it still exceedingly unlikely, and that fact should count for something. Ultimately, reincarnation is incompatible with naturalism, but not because it is too mystical—but rather because even the strongest "steel man" notion of reincarnation considered here is undermined by the simple fact that one's full set of experiences is very unlikely to recur in the life of another person no matter how long the universe goes on.

The argument from miracles is typically held to motivate not only the conclusion that God exists, but also that one should believe 'in' God. In other words, if God exists, so the argument goes, then we must also adopt whatever religious precepts and practices God happens to command. In this essay, Alberto G. Urquidez challenges that presumption. Even if successful—as dubious as that supposition is—an argument from miracles does not entail religious belief in God. Such belief requires further subjective ascription of strong religious significance. A religious miracle obligates religious conversion, which goes beyond rational assent to religious propositions. Since arguments from miracles are descriptive rather than normative, they are insufficient to obligate religious conversion. Once the the necessary conditions for establishing a religious miracle are laid bare, Urquidez shows that they render it impossible to objectively establish a miracle so as to be a just foundation for a religion.

Inspired by Stephen J. Gould's NOMA thesis, it is commonly maintained among academic theists (and some atheists) that religion and science are not in conflict. In this essay David Kyle Johnson argues, by analogy, that science and religion undeniably are in conflict. It begins by quickly defining religion and science and then presents multiple examples that are unquestionable instances of unscientific reasoning and beliefs, and shows how they precisely parallel common mainstream orthodox religious reasoning and doctrines. The essay then considers objections before showing that religion and science conflict when religion encroaches into the scientific domain. It wraps up by showing that religion and science might also conflict when science encroaches into domains traditionally reserved for religion.

In his Secular Web essay "Nonbelief as Support for Atheism," Theodore M. Drange raises objections to J. L. Schellenberg's formulation of the atheistic argument from inculpable nonbelief (sometimes called the divine-hiddenness argument), but no reply to those objections has ever been published. Are Drange's objections sound? Has he established that his own so-called argument from nonbelief (ANB) is superior to the argument put forward by Schellenberg? In this paper, Timothy Chambers attempts to address these questions in part using St. Anselm (and St. Augustine) as his muse. Chambers concludes that if the evangelical Christian worldview were true, we would find unequivocal evidence of God's existence—no intellectually honest inquirer would remain a nonbeliever—and that all nonbelievers would suffer a conspicuous existential "restlessness" or dissatisfaction that they do not in fact suffer. The fact that neither unequivocal evidence of the divine nor universal existential restlessness among nonbelievers are found invites the inference that God does not exist.

In this article John MacDonald examines the possible lie by Jesus in John 7:8-10. The article begins by providing an analysis of the context of lying and deception in the ancient world. Given this background, it moves on to examine (mainly) the insights of Tyler Smith, Adele Reinhartz, Dennis MacDonald, and Hugo Méndez/Candida Moss about the Fourth Gospel and deception. Here John MacDonald explores the thesis that John's Jesus does in fact lie, and that this lie is meant to be understood by the inner-circle reader. Jesus lying to his brothers is the method by which he is able to go up and preach to the crowd; the lie leads to belief or makes belief possible.

In this essay, John MacDonald attempts to recover the oldest meaning of the cross of Jesus and that of Jesus' resurrection in their historical context. The paper argues that penal substitution, the popular conservative evangelical interpretation of the cross, is incorrect, and furthermore that it results in interpretive absurdities when applied to the text/evidence. Penal substitution claims that a just God lacks the ability to forgive, and so requires punishment for sin, where the innocent Jesus was substituted for us sinners and brutally bore the punishment for our sins, wiping our sin debt clean. By contrast, this essay presents a nonpenal substitution participation crucifixion model, where Jesus is understood to be our willing victim as a catalyst for opening our eyes to our hidden "satanic influenced vileness" and for encouraging repentance. The oldest meaning of the resurrection of Jesus will also be shown to be what Jesus' disciples took to be evidence for overcoming death in a blessed way, and empowering us to live righteously. The cross/resurrection argument will further be contextualized in a Second Temple framework of apocalypticism and demonology/superstition to show that the original meaning of the cross and resurrection is so divorced from most modern Christian frameworks and beliefs that many modern Christian would reject the heart of what their ancient counterpart would hold as fundamental to living a good and holy Christian life. The upshot is that the usual modern conservative interpretations of the cross and resurrection bear no, or at least merely superficial, relation to the original ancient ones.

In this essay, Raymond D. Bradley shows that a loving God would be incapable of sending people to Hell by considering what follows logically from accepting the alternative. He argues that free will defenses of the sort offered by Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig are logically fallacious, philosophically erroneous, and unbiblical. Bradley concludes that the problem of Hell puts biblical Christian theists in an inescapable logical bind.

It isn't too difficult to get lost in the language of the God debates. Navigating the landscape can quickly turn frustrating when so many of the foundational texts of theology rival the Bible itself in terms of length. Thankfully, there are books like John Shook's The God Debates that accurately and elegantly break down these sorts of subjects for a lay audience. Shook distinguishes five categories of theology that form the bedrock of discussion in the book. The chapters on these categories constitute an impressive and fairly comprehensive survey of the major approaches to theology in the last several centuries, cataloging important differences that help Shook construct a powerful case for doubt utilizing some of the very same issues that provoke these separations in theological thought. There is much to enjoy and learn from in The God Debates, even for those already acquainted with its major areas of focus. The overview given throughout the book is thought-provoking and insightful on multiple fronts. The author's awareness of so many domains of intersection with religion, and his attention to them, sets a high standard for discourse that needs to be emulated in more of the God debates.

Christian apologists, like Willian Lane Craig and Stephen T. Davis, argue that belief in Jesus' resurrection is reasonable because it provides the best explanation of the available evidence. In this article, David Kyle Johnson refutes that thesis by laying out how the logic of inference to the best explanation (IBE) operates and what good explanations must be and do by definition, and then applying IBE to the issue at hand. Multiple explanations—including the resurrection hypothesis, the lie hypothesis, the coma hypothesis, the imposter hypothesis, and the legend hypothesis—will be considered. While Johnson does not attempt to rank them all from worst to best, he reveals how and why the legend hypothesis is unquestionably the best explanation, while the resurrection hypothesis is undeniably the worst. Consequently, not only is Craig and Davis' conclusion mistaken, but belief in the literal resurrection of Jesus is irrational. In presenting this argument, Johnson does intent to break new ground, as Robert Cavin and Carlos Colombetti have already presented a Bayesian refutation of Craig and Davis' arguments. But he does take himself to be presenting an argument that the average person (and philosopher) can follow. The average person (and philosopher) should be able to clearly understand how and why the hypothesis "God supernaturally raised Jesus from the dead" fails utterly as an explanation of the evidence that Christian apologist cite for Jesus' resurrection.

Graham Oppy's Arguing About Gods is another entry in the long line of treatments of the philosophical arguments in support and rejection of "orthodoxly conceived monotheistic gods," albeit one that brings a depth of discussion and a fair-headed consideration of reasons and motives that helps to set it apart from many other entries. In this review, Taylor Carr finds Arguing About Gods distinctive in its consideration of both theistic and atheistic arguments with equal precision and discretion, with Oppy ultimately finding them all to admit of enough room for disagreement that none can be truly called successful.

For those interested in the philosophical arguments over God, this book deserves a place of honor next to J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism or even David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Not only has Arguing About Gods aided Carr in his appreciation of the case for unbelief, it has also contributed to a more sympathetic understanding of the theistic outlook for him, which ought to be true of any scholarly and well-balanced survey of arguments for and against orthodoxly conceived monotheistic gods.

In this overview of why we should accept that God is not the source of morality, Raymond D. Bradley first outlines four kinds of crimes that God willingly admits to causing, committing, condoning, or commanding, if the holy scriptures are to be believed: crimes against humanity, war crimes, licensing moral mayhem and murder, and crimes of torture. Since any one of these would contravene morality, a being responsible for them could hardly be said to be a source of morality. There is an explicit contradiction between God's moral perfection and his scriptural crimes since, as Bradley says, "a morally perfect being would not do anything that is morally wrong." So which core belief are traditional theists willing to give up to avoid this contradiction?

Several commentators have attempted to reduce Hume's maxim about miracles to a formula in the language of probability theory. This paper examines two such attempts, one of which is based on the probability of the alleged miracle conditioned by the testimony for it, and the other on its unconditional probability. The conditional probability leads to a formula that is valid—though only when qualified—but not useful, while the unconditional probability results in an invalid formula. The utility of expressing Hume's maxim in terms of probability theory is shown to be questionable, and an alternative approach is presented.

Up to the present day, a large number of the followers of Abrahamic religions have insisted that the accounts of creation found in the book of Genesis are a literal historical account of past events. Do they have any basis in actual history? Are they original to the Hebrew people? If not, what or who inspired them? In this thorough examination of the history and mythology of the cultures surrounding ancient Israel, Jason Gibson compares the oldest creation myths of Mesopotamia with those found in Genesis to demonstrate a clear connection between ancient Hebrew beliefs and the Sumerian myths that predated them.

In this article David Kyle Johnson argues that both the diversity of religious experiences and natural explanations for them entail that religious experiences cannot provide justification for religious beliefs. Johnson first considers the supposed role of religious experiences in justifying religious belief, then shows how the diversity of religious experiences raises an inductive problem that negates the ability of religious experience to justify religious belief. Finally, he shows that available natural explanations for religious experiences have the same end result by providing better explanations of religious experiences than religious explanations of them.