When people try defend religions from the charge that they are riddled with superstitions and are a negative influence on society, they will often invoke Buddhism as a counter example. Even I have spoken favorably of Buddhism in the past but is should be emphasized that Buddhism looks fairly good only in comparison with religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. [Read more…]
The post yesterday on god as dog owner about how best to respond to religious people who say that the reason we cannot understand why a good god allows suffering is similar to why a dog does not understand why his owner takes him to the vet for what may be painful treatment for his own good. It is something that to the dog is a deep mystery because it is beyond the dog’s comprehension. In the same way that the owner’s actions are ineffable to the dog, God is ineffable to us. [Read more…]
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984) is one of the founders of quantum physics, whose name we will encounter later in the series of posts on the Higgs. Due to his family’s low financial status, he initially studied engineering but fortunately for the world of physics, he could not get a job as an engineer and managed to scrape up the money to pursue graduate study in physics at Cambridge. He rapidly established himself in the emerging field of quantum mechanics, winning a Nobel Prize at the age of 31. [Read more…]
Theodicy, the problem of how a benevolent and all-powerful god can allow suffering, is the fatal weakness of religion. There is simply no good answer that religious people can give even though theologians have grappled with this problem for millenia. That does not stop people from trying though, and I recently received the following email that offers one variant. I am posting it and my response because I think it may be of general interest. Here is the body of the email. [Read more…]
The new pope Francis has been getting great press. This has been almost entirely due to style, not substance. As far as we know, his opposition to same sex marriage, abortion, contraception, priestly celibacy, and ordination of women as clergy are no less reactionary than those of his predecessor. But the fact that he seems more informal, self-effacing, and at ease with ordinary people when compared with his austere predecessor seems to have enthralled followers and the media alike. [Read more…]
In the third post in this series (see Part 1 and Part 2), I said that despite the risks presented by being blindsided with the Craig Con, it would be a pity to avoid face-to-face debates with religionists altogether because such exchanges are often sponsored by religious groups and the audience often consists of religious people. These debates can serve as a means of reaching audiences who may not otherwise hear the scientific and atheist point of view. [Read more…]
In the first two posts in this series (here and here) I said William Lane Craig is a theologian who is a practiced and smooth debater and master practitioner of what I call the ‘Craig Con’, a debating tactic where one brings in all manner of arguments from a wide range of science that are associated with cutting-edge research emanating from famous and highly-regarded scientists working at elite institutions. If one is not properly prepared to counter them, one can get buried under that weight, even if the arguments themselves are flawed. One has to prepare carefully for such debates. [Read more…]
Ohio’s Republican senator Rob Portman has written an op-ed in today’s papers announcing that he is reversing his long-standing opposition to same-sex marriage (he also opposed gay people adopting children, was a co-sponsor of DOMA, and even supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage) and now supports it. The reason for his surprising move? The fact that his own son told him in February 2011 that he was gay. [Read more…]
In yesterday’s Part 1 of this three-part series, I wrote about how in debating sophisticated religious people, atheists have the disadvantage in that science impacts religion in many ways and that atheists, even if they are scientists, cannot know about all developments everywhere and so can be blindsided by arguments based on science that they have little knowledge about. I have labeled this the ‘Craig Con’, in contrast to the older and cruder ‘Gish Gallop’, because some theologians are now more sophisticated than the ones who came before and use information from cutting-edge science to give the same old and tired arguments for god a patina of freshness and credibility. William Lane Craig is the smoothest practitioner of this debating tactic, though by no means the only one. [Read more…]