thoughtful ideas on life's big questions
The christian religion has lost numbers in most western countries over the past half century, but there are still people becoming christians too. But what leads them to believe in Jesus? Do they just believe what they were brought up to believe? Do they sift the evidence? Or do they experience God in some way? […]
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 […]
I seem to be getting into quite a few discussions about universal fine-tuning lately. Only recently I discussed the argument for the existence of God based on the science of fine-tuning, and before that I discussed the science. Here, I want to give some quotes and references to cosmologists who have written on this topic.
Sceptics sometimes say they would need more tangible evidence to believe – there’s insufficient evidence in the Bible and in the philosophical arguments for God, they say, so they need something incontrovertible. Yet at the same time, many say that no matter how much evidence there is for an action of God in the world, […]
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 […]
J Warner (Jim) Wallace is a homicide detective, and an atheist-turned christian. This is his story and the reasons why he changed his mind about Jesus.
It’s a common theme of atheist critiques of religion: religion causes war and mass killing. And yet the historical evidence shows something different.
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 […]