What's New Archive ● 2018 ● February
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February 28, 2018
Added Review of The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2018) by Aron Lucas to the Theistic Cosmological Arguments, Argument to Design, Moral Arguments, and Argument from Miracles pages under Arguments for the Existence of a God, as well as the William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland pages under Christian Apologetics and Apologists, in the Modern Documents section of the Secular Web Library.
The massive Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology aims to be the standard reference work supplying the best reasons to believe that God exists from the foremost experts on various arguments for the existence of God. It is not recommended for readers without some background knowledge of the philosophy of religion, modal logic, and Bayesian confirmation theory. Nevertheless, it cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to argue that belief in God is irrational or intellectually bankrupt. In this review, Aron Lucas focuses on its chapters on the kalam cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, and the argument from miracles. Despite some valuable novel contributions, the volume focuses too heavily on defending some premises while ignoring others, and is highly technical even for advanced readers, with one argument presented in 87 steps purely using symbolic logic. One can only wonder why God would make the evidence for his existence accessible only to a select handful of professional academics, let alone punish people with eternal torment because they failed to properly apply Bayesian reasoning to little known historical data. The very fact that the volume needs to dig so deep in order to make its case is, in a way, evidence against the existence of God.