The Secular Outpost

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. Philipians 2:9-11 (NIV)I don't think so. Not this knee. This knee will NOT be bowing at "the name of Jesus".My knee will remain straight and unbent, because I know and understand "the name of Jesus". I … [Read more...]

I want to continue where I left off in part 1 of my response to Metacrock on the use of Bayes’ Theorem (BT) to measure evidence about God. Here is Metacrock: Bayes’ theorem was introduced first as an argument against Hume’s argument on miracles, that is to say, a proof of the probability of miracles. The theorem was learned by Richard Price from Bayes papers after the death of the latter, and was first communicated to the Royal society in 1763.[6] The major difference in the version … [Read more...]

Over at the Christian Cadre, “Metacrock” has written a post entitled, “Bayes Theorum [sic] and Probability of God: No Dice!” Metacrock makes a number of points regarding the use of Bayes’ Theorem (BT) with evidence about God’s existence. I want to comment on many of those points. It is understandable that naturalistic thinkers are uneasy with the concept of miracles. I think I understand the point that Metacrock is trying to get across, but I disagree with this sentence as … [Read more...]

John Loftus recently announced the publication of his latest book, The Outsider Test for Faith. I am massively behind on my list of books to read, so I haven’t read it yet. But I have no doubt it’s a book everyone—theists, agnostics, atheists—interested in the “big questions” should read. So, if you haven’t yet read it, I encourage you to check it out! … [Read more...]

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Kahnman’s wonderful book, Thinking, Fast and Slow and came upon the section in which he discusses the ‘affect heuristic’. The affect heuristic is the notion that people often make decisions based on their feelings or emotions about the topic at hand. It is an example of “substitution”, in which “the answer to an easy question (How do I feel about it?) serves as an answer to a much harder question (What do I think about it?)”. (139) One of the most … [Read more...]

Dr. Maarten Boudry performs a 'Sokal-style hoax' on two theology conferences. Here is the abstract: The Paradoxes of Darwinian Disorder. Towards an Ontological Reaffirmation of Order and Transcendence. Robert A. Maundy,  College of the Holy Cross, Reno, NevadaIn the Darwinian perspective, order is not immanent in reality, but it is a self-affirming aspect of reality in so far as it is experienced by situated subjects. However, it is not so much reality that is self-affirming, but the … [Read more...]

I have a cartoon on my office door showing a pie chart representing religious affiliation in the U.S. Of course, by far the largest section of the pie is labelled "Christian." All others are represented by small slivers. A speech balloon from the Christian part says "Help! We are being oppressed!" The rhetoric of oppression is still absurdly used by Christian polemicists. Every holiday season we hear about the "war on Christmas." The removal of "Roy's Rock,"--a two-and-a-half ton granite … [Read more...]

  In his 2012 book, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg defends an argument for nihilism.[1] In this article I want to evaluate his argument. Definitions Before we turn to his argument, we first need to understand how Rosenberg defines his terms. Let us begin with the word “scientism.” In his own words, Rosenberg defines “scientism” as follows. But we’ll call the worldview that all us atheists (and even some agnostics) share “scientism.” This is the … [Read more...]

In my recent post “The Perfect Goodness of God – Again” I used conditional derivation to prove a conditional statement, and took that to be sufficient to prove that the antecedent of the conditional statement entailed the consequent. Then I had second thoughts about that approach to proving an entailment.Penance for my possible sin against logic is to look up the terms ‘implication’ and ‘entailment’ (as well as other related terms: ‘deduction’ and ‘validity’) in various … [Read more...]

Here is my summary of Craig’s “argument from intentionality” in his recent debate with Alex Rosenberg. 5. God is the best explanation for the intentional states of consciousness in the world. Philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality, the state of being about something or being of something. It signifies the object-directendess of our thoughts, such as thinking about my summer vacation or about my wife. But no physical object has this capability. A chair, a stone, or … [Read more...]