Modern Library

Resurrection. Resurrection is the Semitic and biblical alternative to the Greek idea of immortality of the soul on the one hand, and to the Indian idea of reincarnation on the other. Resurrection refers to the glorious hope that at the end of earthly history, the righteous of past ages will rise bodily to new life […]

Those who closely study the origin, development, and structure of the universe tend to disbelieve in any spiritual dimension to it. Science has inadvertently discovered that religious pictures of the world are false; when speaking to the same questions, science and religion invariably get different answers. Cosmology has no need for a First Cause since the Big Bang might simply be a transitional phase in an infinitely old universe or, alternatively, there may be no "before" the Big Bang anymore than there is a "north" of the North Pole. Appeals to alleged fine-tuning are presumptuous: physicists extrapolating from the earliest well-understood moment after the Big Bang using the laws of physics alone would erroneously deem our universe inhospitable to life. How, then, can we reliably anticipate the likelihood of life arising in hypothetical universes with different laws? Even supposing that physical constants are in fact "tunable" (which they may not be), constants might take on different values in other universes; and as Carroll puts it, "intelligent observers will only measure the values which obtain in those regions which are consistent with the existence of such observers." Finally, cosmology betrays unintelligent design: entire classes of fundamental particles exist that would have no impact on life in they had never existed. Evidently, a simple materialist formalism could offer a complete description of the universe.

A Critique of Fundamentalism (II) Steven J. Conifer [Author’s Note: The following is an extension of my essay “A Critique of Fundamentalism,” in which I critique chapters 1 and 5 of Henry M. Morris’ and Martin E. Clark’s The Bible Has the Answer. The essay is located on the Secular Web at https://infidels.org/library/modern/steven_conifer/fundamentalism.html.]   4.1. […]

From Taoist to Infidel (2001) Richard Carrier My experiences with religion as a child were all good. My mother was a church secretary at a First Methodist Church only a block from our home, and I attended Sunday School fairly regularly, but my parents rarely insisted that I attend any sermons. The religion sold at […]

Argument from Holy Scripture: Mormon Scripture Book of Abraham [ Index ] In 1835, Joseph Smith acquired a collection of papyrus fragments from a traveling Egyptian show. He claimed to be able to translate these fragments, and the Book of Abraham is the result. The articles selected here confront the origins and “divine” nature of this text. […]

Prophecy The Argument from the Bible (1996) by Theodore Drange “Almost all evangelical Christians believe that the writing of the Bible was divinely inspired and represents God’s main revelation to humanity. They also believe that the Bible contains special features which constitute evidence of its divine inspiration. This would be a use of the Bible […]

Religious Experience According to the argument from religious experience (ARE), the “self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit” or other mystical experiences constitute direct evidence of communion with God or other supernatural beings. In “The Will to Believe” (1896) William James distinguishes between strong and weak versions of the argument. The strong version contends that religious […]

The Bible in the Book of Mormon (1999) by Curt van den Heuvel “The Book of Mormon was written by someone who either had a KJV Bible in front of him, or was intimately familiar with its contents. When we add to this phenomenon other Book of Mormon problems, such as the lack of any […]

Review of Skeptics and True Believers (2005) Thomas Clark   Review: Chet Raymo. 1998. Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion. New York: Walker and Company. 288 pp. This article was originally published at naturalism.org in 1998, home page of the Center for Naturalism. This version contains minor editorial changes. Science […]

Nietzsche’s The Antichrist (1999) Travis J. Denneson I. Introduction In his book, The Antichrist, Nietzsche sets out to denounce and illegitimize not only Christianity itself as a belief and a practice, but also the ethical-moral value system which modern western civilization has inherited from it. This book can be considered a further development of some […]

The Functional Equivalent of God (1998) Victor J. Stenger   Review of The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God. Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress 1995. In Chapter 1, the author of The Creator and the Cosmos tells us of a meeting he attended in which a distinguished philosopher […]