Category: Philosophy
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“Being understood by the things that are made”
… Even more remarkable is the claim that the unbelievers and pagans “are without excuse” because they “knew God” who is “understood by the things that are made.” …
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On the Soul
Discourse about the soul is ancient, continues to this very day online and in academia, and spans many languages and traditions, with research spanning multiple disciplines and, all told, literally thousands of relevant books. I cannot hope to do all of that justice in this essay, so I will not try. My aim is much…
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A Rationalist Approaches Christianity
I am privately linking from here (below) a new essay about Christian religious epistemology, 20,700 words (if you can believe that). Here is the first paragraph: The purpose of this discussion is to determine whether I should—whether it is rationally justified to—conduct a systematic study of natural and revealed religion, in order to decide whether…
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Not all ways of changing the world are good
Not all ways of changing the world are good. Some edges you don’t go over, ever. Some edgelords are the enemy. Some rebellion is shockingly evil. Sometimes, wearing the clothes of the devil means you’re the goddamn Devil. Some actions and people are objectively evil—the enemy.Not everything in life is a game. Some appalling outrages…
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Why God Might Exist: A Dialogue Concerning Unnatural Religion
Modern religious skeptics often declare that the reason they are atheists is that there is no good evidence for the existence of God. It is as if they were mere dispassionate judges, and no one has yet submitted adequate reasons to adopt a belief in God to them—the immaculate Tribunal of Reason, of course. Such…
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On Attitudes Toward Evil
As I have been thinking in recent months both about different religions—but especially Christianity—and about evil in general, it strikes me suddenly that how different worldviews regard evil is deeply important. This is especially important to me now because of the stunning and sickening amounts of evidence that has emerged that many, not just a…
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Why I Have Not Been a Christian, and Why That Might Change
A Personal History of My Nonbelief I think I lost the faith I was raised in (Lutheran) when I was 16, a few years after the family stopped going regularly to church. That was when I first started studying philosophy more seriously. To be specific, I stopped being Christian because I stopped believing in God.…
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On the “God of the Gaps”
If God exists, he knows all the physical explanations of all the phenomena. From his point of view, there is no “God of the gaps.” Hence our inability to explain something about the world is no reason to infer that God makes human-style arbitrary choices. In other words, for example, God’s mechanism for creating life…
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On the Burning of an LGBTQ Flag
Last summer, Adolfo Martinez, 30, of Ames, Iowa, stole the LGBTQ pride flag hung above the entrance to the Ames United Church of Christ, and burned it in front of the nearby Dangerous Curves Gentleman’s Club. He pled guilty to the crime—for which he was sentenced to 16 years in the state penitentiary. This surprising…
