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Entries Tagged as 'Philip Quinn'

There’s Probably No God? Fisking Atheist Billboards

July 12th, 2010 430 Comments

On the way back from Bloggers drinks we drove past one of the controversial atheist advertising billboards, put up by NZ Atheist Campaign, The Humanist Society and NZARH, which have appeared around Auckland. This appears to have come on the back of the Richard Dawkins inspired bus advertising that made headlines earlier this year. It […]

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Contra Mundum: Secularism and Public Life

June 1st, 2010 63 Comments

Legal scholar Stephen Carter stated, One good way to end a conversation – or start an argument – is to tell a group of well educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required by your understanding of God’s will. In […]

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Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part III

November 25th, 2009 3 Comments

In my last posts, beginning Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part I, I set out the doctrine of religious restraint and touched on some criticisms of it. I looked at and critiqued some of the key arguments in support of the doctrine of religious restraint. In this post I will look at the objection that […]

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Religious Restraint and Public Policy: Part I

November 23rd, 2009 31 Comments

In this series I set out the doctrine of religious restraint, the idea that in a pluralistic, liberal, society religious beliefs should not be utilised in the formation of public policy. I note that this doctrine entails an asymmetrical treatment of religious and secular beliefs, which appears to conflict with the central notion of liberal […]

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Sunday Study: Abraham and Isaac – Did God Command the Killing of an Innocent?

July 26th, 2009 17 Comments

Perhaps the most infamous passage in the Hebrew scriptures occurs in Genesis 22:2, Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” Of course, as anyone who […]

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John W. Loftus on The Christian Illusion of Moral Superiority Part I

May 7th, 2009 14 Comments

Several Christian thinkers, most notably, C S Lewis, John Hare, Robert Adams and William Lane Craig have argued that Theism provides a superior foundation for moral obligation than Naturalism does. Most of these thinkers defend this notion by developing and defending a divine command theory.[1] John W Loftus is aware of this and in The […]

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The Euthyphro Objection Part I: Against Divine Commands & Avoiding Strawmen

October 28th, 2007 2 Comments

Perhaps the most common argument against an appeal to divine commands in ethical reasoning is the Euthyphro dilemma, first articulated by Plato and utilised by numerous critics of divine commands ever since. A representative example of this line of argument occurs in Peter Singer’s widely-acclaimed monograph Practical Ethics. In the first chapter of Practical Ethics, […]

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