Today our faculty book discussion group continued its discussion of Philip Kitcher’s book, began Charles Taylor’s monumental A Secular Age, as well as a couple of articles by Mackey and Swinburne on the problem of evil thrown in. If there is one key thought I’d share as regards faith and the loss or lack thereof, much revolves around the depiction of God as a person very much like us, and the correlated problem of evil. My advice to people of... Read more

The Higgaion blog pointed out an article in the LA Times about Christians praying…for the end of the writers’ strike! Although these seem to have been industry insiders, the story led me to wonder how many other Christians around the United States are offering up similar prayers. I doubt that many of the Christians who have been praying in this way have thought about issues of justice and fairness when doing so. They just want their TV viewing to continue... Read more

“Verbal prayers make sense, I think, if you know in advance that talking to God is like talking to your dog. You say human words to your dog, but he pretty much ignores that in favor of how you smell. Similarly, whatever divinity there is hears your words of prayer but very likely ignores all you say in favor of the aroma of your heart: your kindness, your compassion – for both your own poor soul and for your have-not... Read more

I find myself becoming somewhat weary of opponents of Christianity and of religion in general who point to its flaws but offer no appreciation of its strengths, who criticize its failures but make no mention of its successes. I thus wish to offer an open post today in which I ask a question: What is the atheist contribution to world civilization? What have atheists offered that was not offered before them by philosophers who believed in some sort of God,... Read more

“There is no one image of God that works in all circumstances” (Jeremy Campbell, The Many Faces of God (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006) p.270). Read more

Apparently Michael Behe, after only 105 days after being challenged on it, has conceded he was wrong about a particular scientific claim. Read more about what else he and others did in the mean time here. Read more

“In the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ, and it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus” (J.P. Moreland, “How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What Can Be Done About It”, presentation to the 2007 Evangelical Theological Society meeting in San... Read more

We exist in the middle, in between. Stretching out beyond us in one “direction” is the micro-world, where we discover that matter and life and love all arise out of energy, and we lose track of what is going on, or at least the ability to imagine what it is like, as we enter the realm of quantum uncertainty. Stretching out beyond us in all directions is the macro-world. The Max Planck Institute created the millenium simulation to extrapolate from... Read more

There is a discussion of a post of mine from a couple of months ago, “Why I am a Christian“, taking place on the Debunking Christianity blog. Come on over and join the fun! Read more

A while back I wrote a letter to the editor of a local free newspaper, responding to a letter by another reader who claimed that the Bible was written in the time of Constantine. The author of this initial letter has now responded once again, asking where the manuscripts are from before the time of Constantine. Although I can hear gasps of disbelief (and perhaps a few guffaws of laughter) from historians and Biblical scholars, I think it is important... Read more