Added Position Eliminated: Why Paul Herrick’s Critique Fails (2023) by Keith M. Parsons to the Theistic Cosmological Arguments page under Arguments for the Existence of a God in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
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.
New in the Kiosk: Purely Unreasonable Jesus (2023) by Stephen Van Eck
The famous parables of Jesus cursing a fig tree and chasing moneychangers from the Temple, widely touted by both believers and nonbelievers as morally warranted, illustrate a kind of unreasonable entitlement that reveals an unflattering side of the character of the New Testament Jesus. In this essay Stephen Van Eck tackles the tendency by believers and doctrinally influenced nonbelievers to hold to a pre-existing conception of a morally perfect Jesus that leads them to overlook otherwise blatant character flaws revealed through such parables. Van Eck also provides grounds for understanding the approval of abusive treatment portrayed at the hands of the New Testament Jesus as one historical root of anti-Semitism.