In case you haven’t heard, Patheos picked up a new Atheism blogger recently: Libby Anne of Love, Joy, Feminism (we snaked her from Freethought Blogs). As a welcome to the neighborhood, we’re doing two Q&A posts today. Her answers are running here on Unequally Yoked and mine are running chez elle. Don’t hold Libby responsible for the questions, I wrote them, and there are two per category (blog-related, personal, and wacky). Q: What’s the target audience for your blog, what... Read more
(Part two of two on the apologetics offered by missionaries outside the Reason Rally) In my second discussion outside the Reason Rally, a pair of tag-teaming Christians were trying to bootstrap from my belief in immaterial laws of logic or morality to evidence for an immaterial God. They must have thought they were handed a trump card when I admitted I find the doctrine of Original Sin to have an intuitive resonance. Humans have a tendency toward disorder, and the cruelties... Read more
(Part one of two on the apologetics offered by missionaries outside the Reason Rally) I was about an hour late to the Reason Rally because I couldn’t resist stopping to talk to the Christian evangelists who were ringing the rally. The conversations probably went on longer than was productive (I’m bad at taking my own advice about walking away from arguments), but I thought there were some interesting tactics on display. The biggest surprise? I heard more pitches for radical... Read more
A friend of mine, who blogs sporadically as Squelchtoad, had a great response to the NYT review of Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing that I mentioned in the recent neuroscience post. I’m excerpting Squelchtoad’s commentary, but you should hop over and read the brief piece yourself: But it occurs to me that the Albert riposte to Lawrence Krauss might also work at least for the more naïve versions of that theological argument. What does it mean for God to... Read more
Greta Christina and a different Christina at Freethought Blogs both recently came to the conclusion that the Christine doctrine of Heaven is coercive. It’s so dangerous that Greta Christina called it “almost as evil a doctrine as Hell.” Here’s their reasoning: The promise of Heaven is the biggest reward of all. The promise of Heaven is infinite. It is the promise that you will get to live forever, and will never have to die. It is the promise that you... Read more
If I found a black box with a number keypad and a printer tape, I could make tables of all the inputs I tested and the outputs. I put in a 1 and get a 3. A 7 gets me 127. Non-integers return ‘ERROR.’ Depending on what ends up in my table, I might be able to make some reasonably confident guesses about what was going on inside the box. Provided I had been careful to watch out for positive... Read more
The Chronicle of Higher Education is holding an essay symposium on Free Will and I have so many problems with Jerry Coyne’s contribution: “You Don’t Have Free Will.” To begin with, I have a general suspicion that the debate over free will is terrible at least in part because the definition of free will is incoherent. (Yudkowsky has a good essay on recognizing and defusing definitional debates). What we are fumbling after is the reason we are morally culpable for our own actions.... Read more
I was considering writing an April Fools day post, but life’s too short to not blog about epidemiology and epistemology. As is often the case when I go back to Yale for alumni debates, I ended up in some extended theological debates. In a conversation with one friend, we ended up on thse topic that used to form the core of my about section: what evidence would persuade me that Christianity (or another religion) is true? I think it’s possible... Read more
Last week the European Court of Human Rights ruled that same-sex marriage is not a human right guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights. In addition, according to The Daily Mail’s write-up of the case, the court ruled that if gay couples are allowed to marry, any church that offers weddings will be guilty of discrimination if it declines to marry same-sex couples. Before I get to the main point, I have to say that last part struck me... Read more
In one of my Reason Rally posts, I talked about why atheists feel such an urgent need to change other people’s beliefs. If false beliefs aren’t generally accepted, it’s easier to catch and help people before they take dangerous action based on their incorrect views of the world. (The example was a woman who cut her son’s throat because she believed he was possessed). Iota had a good follow-up question in the comments: [Is it] reasonable to expect that, simply... Read more
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