Andy Thomson on Why We Believe in Gods

April 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Your Thoughts?

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheist Videos, Biology, Disambiguating Faith, Evolutionary Psychology, God, Psychology, Religion, Religion and Science Tagged With: , , Leave a Comment

Camels With Hammers Philosophy

September 27, 2009 By 1 Comment

After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.” This post will [...]

Filed Under: About This Blog, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Authoritarianism, Authority, Autonomy, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Duty, Epistemology, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Faith, Featured, Fundamentalism, God, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Homophobia, Homosexuality, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Politics, Psychology, Religion and Science, Religious Extremism, Religious Rights, Religious Secularism, Secularism, Sociobiology, Teleology, Virtues, Why I Am Not A Christian Tagged With: 1 Comment

On Failing To Grasp How Competition Can Be Cooperative And How Cooperation Can Be Counter-Productive

September 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most [...]

Filed Under: Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Philosophical Ethics, Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociobiology Tagged With: , , , , 2 Comments

Challenging Myths Of Eden

September 22, 2009 By 3 Comments

Below is a thought-provoking video which critiques the notion of fallenness from several angles.  It builds off of one point I’ve wanted to write about for a while and that’s that the non-literal reading of Genesis is just as false as the metaphorical one.  When religious people argue that the Garden of Eden story is [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Christianity, Evolutionary Psychology, Featured, Judaism, Religion, Videos Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

The Yearning Animal

September 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Greta Christina takes down the argument that the desire for God proves there is a God to fulfill it out there to be discovered: Someone (I can’t remember who now) recently pointed out that the “no atheists in foxholes” argument, even if it were true (which it’s not), isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s actually [...]

Filed Under: Arguments for the Existence of God, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Featured, Music, Music Videos, Nietzsche, Psychology, Videos Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

Bad Evolutionary Psychology: Attractiveness

August 8, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Sendai Anonymous tears into Satoshi Kanazawa for His ridiculous research trying (and failing) to link “attractiveness” with reproductive strategies and reproductive success, and all sorts of vacuous claims regarding “attractiveness”. His statistics proved to be flawed and were many times criticised, which Kanazawa obviously ignored. He also claimed that women are getting more “attractive” faster [...]

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The Evolutionary Advantages And Present Disadvantages Of Our Conformist Minds

August 1, 2009 By 2 Comments

John Wilkins has a good post on the value of our minds’ readinesses to defer to authorities from an evolutionary standpoint: The evolutionary justification for this is, of course the following: if evolution were a designer, trying to ensure that thinking beings learned and knew what they had to to survive, a cheaper rule than [...]

Filed Under: Authority, Epistemology, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Psychology, Nietzsche, Philosophy Tagged With: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Are Sex and Morality Merely “Evolutionary Tricks”?

August 1, 2009 By 4 Comments

Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism.  The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion.  Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin.  Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in [...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Francis Collins, Moral Psychology, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Nietzsche, Philosophical Ethics, Psychology, Religion, Sex, Social Psychology, Sociobiology Tagged With: , , , 4 Comments

An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against Traditionalism

July 27, 2009 By 12 Comments

I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong.  Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people [...]

Filed Under: Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Autonomy, Civil Rights, Cultural Secularism, Culture, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Gay Marriage, Homosexuality, Jesus, Moral Psychology, My Theory of Morality's Rational Foundations and Nature, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Political Secularism, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Religious Secularism, Same Sex Marriage, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Social Psychology, Sociobiology, Sociology, Virtues Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 12 Comments

Stephen Pinker Makes The Case Against The “Blank Slate”

July 21, 2009 By 2 Comments

Thanks to AtheisTube for the find. Your Thoughts?

Filed Under: Biology, Evolution, Evolutionary Psychology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Psychology Tagged With: , , , , , 2 Comments