thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
When considering a contentious question, it can be helpful to see how much thoughtful protagonists concede to the other side, for this is an indicator of the range of reasonable views. For example, if a thoughtful and knowledgable christian concedes an area of doubt about Jesus, there is a fair chance that doubt has some […]
Not long after christianity began, a critic named Celsus argued that Jesus couldn’t have been divine, for he missed the opportunity to prove his divinity by disappearing from the cross. I find this an unsatisfactory argument, because it assumes that Celsus knew what God’s purpose was. And I find similarly unsatisfactory arguments being used today.
A reader, Hugo, and I have been discussing the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God in the comments section of another post. His most recent comment contained a number of interesting points, so I thought there was enough for a new post. So here are Hugo’s comments, shown as blockquotes, with my responses. (I […]
I’m not sure how seriously I take this story, but it is interesting – attempting to measure something intangible. How certain are writers about what they say about God and ethics? And how open-minded do they think they are? So I hope it’s worth a look.
It’s a common theme of atheist critiques of religion: religion causes war and mass killing. And yet the historical evidence shows something different.
I find statistics on religion to be interesting, and helpful in understanding what is going on in the world. In previous posts I have outlined: The major religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) are growing in numbers worldwide, but (Religion statistics), but only Islam and Pentecostal Christianity are growing in percentage terms. Almost half of […]
Last post I discussed The science of universal fine-tuning, a topic that is much argued over these days. Of course we know one of the reasons behind the arguments is that the science of fine tuning forms a basis for an argument for the existence of God. So the stakes are high for both theists […]
Graphs of cosmological variables, with life-permitting regions shown in white. From The Fine-Tuning of the Universe for Intelligent Life by Luke Barnes. Don’t worry – you don’t have to understand these graphs to understand this post! Recently I was a participant in a discussion on the science of fine-tuning, on Howie’s blog, Truth is Elusive. […]
Human beings have a wide variety of beliefs and opinions on almost any subject you can imagine. This is just as true for the ‘big’ topics of God, religion, ethics, politics and purpose in life. And most of us like to think we are ‘right’ – we have the truth, and others don’t. But we […]
Why do you believe what you do – about religion, politics, ethics or life itself? Many sceptics about religion are evidentialists, that is, they believe we should proportion our belief according to the evidence. Different disciplines (e.g. law, science, history, journalism and everyday life) require different types of evidence, but the principle seems reasonable. But […]