Let’s consider truth. Truth in the abstract. The concept of truth. Why does it matter to us? To be clear, the question is not whether particular things are true or not, or whether we prefer truth to falsity, or even our affinity for truth as opposed to falsehood in ourselves or others. The question is: Why […]
Read more...Category: Materialist Doctrine
Christian Violence
I am so weary of this worn-out old canard that Christian religion is responsible for violence and wars, and therefore the sooner we abandon it, the better. This is put forward relentlessly and Joseph-Goebbels-like: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” All the wars and violence of history that are attributed to religion […]
Read more...Wester
Easter In last year’s Easter post I talked about the origin of that word, “Easter.” It is a reference to the direction, east, where the morning sun rises as a metaphor for the resurrection to come. In the early days of Christianity, new believers understood they were embracing the God of the Jews, and the […]
Read more...If No God
No Third Way People who reject religion think “religion is not true” but often don’t think about what is true if the idea of God is removed. To say idea X is false is just a negation of X. It’s not a statement of what idea is true in its place. Most (not all) people […]
Read more...Mere Machines
New Atheists In the days of the frothing-at-the-mouth “new atheists” starting in around 2008, many of the more vulnerable fence-sitters on the God question were swallowed up and inoculated against rational thought on the subject. “Nones” What followed was an even larger rise in the number of people who apparently think one can remain neutral […]
Read more...Simple Determinism
A central tenet of theist and especially Christian beliefs is that people have agency; that is, moral choice and therefore moral responsibility, based on a moral Authority outside themselves. The modern view of reality, however, is that there is nothing beyond matter in motion governed by laws of physics, and therefore no God, and therefore no […]
Read more...Godless Origin of Life
What Materialism Teaches The secular orthodox position is that the building blocks of life must have coalesced from inorganic materials at hand through some process made possible by the environment at a time millions of years ago on earth. Perhaps lightning or sunlight or chemical catalysis as a source of energy acting on inorganic compounds […]
Read more...Fine-tuning
We sometimes refer to the “fine-tuning” of the universe as a way to denote the necessity of various constants being exactly what they are, for the universe to exist as it does. This includes the forces identified as acting upon physical bodies, including gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism. It also includes, […]
Read more...Multiverse
We took up the appearance of fine-tuning of the universe, in Gravity. Now we proceed to the multiverse, and, if it exists, how it affects the apparent fine-tuning. What if there are multiple universes? Why couldn’t there be other universes that not only might have existed under different conditions, but actually do, presently, co-exist? In […]
Read more...Gravity
Scientists have come to understand that there are measurable features of our universe that make life possible. These are often discussed in scientific and philosophical works as variations on the anthropic principle. Christian apologists sometimes refer to it as the argument for God from the fine-tuning of the universe. It may be helpful to think […]
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