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Entries Tagged as 'Atheism'

God or Natural Law: A False Dichotomy

May 30th, 2015 Comments Off on God or Natural Law: A False Dichotomy

A few weeks ago someone showed me a newspaper article entitled “New theory could prove how life began and disprove God”, which was published in the UK newspaper The Independent. Now I have, of course, heard media pronouncements of the nature published in this article frequently, reporters often seem to have a knack for making provocative pronouncements about […]

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Is belief in God essential for Morality? Why Crime Statistics don’t answer this question

November 18th, 2014 7 Comments

Readers of this blog will note that, of late, I have been focusing a lot in my thinking, writing and research on questions of the relationship between religion and morality. One particular frustration I encounter in this topic is the, unfortunately common, tendency for writers and researchers to conflate separate questions and subsequently give answers […]

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Is it Arrogant to Claim Jesus is the Only Way?

October 12th, 2013 7 Comments

Last week I spoke at Massey Presbyterian Church on the topic “Is it arrogant to claim Jesus is the only way?” The following is an abridged version of the talk I gave. I was recently on a panel at Auckland University where an audience member raised the issue during the Q&A of religious pluralism. The issue […]

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I’m so Objective about how You’re so Subjective

May 25th, 2011 19 Comments

One general objection to theistic arguments for God is that no such argument could be based on the subjective experience of one’s own cognitive processes, and that therefore it suggests delusions of grandeur to think that one can get from such a basis to God necessarily existing. But to deny that a sound argument could […]

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Religion, Science, 9/11 and the Moon: Dawkins’ Response to Copan

March 9th, 2011 107 Comments

Parchment and Pen, has an audio of a brief exchange between Paul Copan and Richard Dawkins who was speaking in Ft. Lauderdale at Nova Southeastern University on “The Fact of Evolution.” (The following week, Paul Copan spoke on “The Fact of God” at Nova Southeastern and gave a direct response to Dawkins.) This MP3 of Paul Copan and […]

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Hoist with one’s own petard

February 24th, 2011 28 Comments

When a Christian says that all other religions are false, he is deemed narrow minded. When an atheist says that all religions are false, she is deemed open minded.      

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The Presumption of Theism

February 23rd, 2011 87 Comments

Modern analytic philosophy of religion, so it seems, is largely dominated by purely theoretical and evidential considerations. That is, the question of whether or not theistic belief is rational is decided purely on the balance of total available public evidence as opposed to existential and pragmatic considerations. The addition of the term “public” to the […]

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