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Tag Archives: apologetics
Thomas Aquinas for Beginners
Listening closely to theist arguments–and Aquinas. As an agnostic, I’m not sure whether God exists or not, nor whether Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysics is wholly correct, but I’m also not the sort of person who is interested in practicing confirmation bias … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, Catholicism, essentialism, God, philosophy, Sartre, Thomas Aquinas
17 Comments
Some Good Reasons to Think Adam and Eve Never Existed
First, there was never a bottleneck of two people that accounts for the diversity of humans living today. Second, geneticists tell us that the diversity of contemporary humans derives from no less than 12,500 black African ancestors, 2,500 of whom … Continue reading
Who Shapes and Defines the Clay, and Who Cuts the Deck of Definition? Hylomorphism, Aquinas, Sartre, and Evolution
What is hylomorphism? Hylomorphism is a term out of classical philosophy (first used by Aristotle, later picked up by Aquinas) where a designer takes raw material and uses her mind and hands to impose purpose and form on it, as … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, aquinas, atheism, evolution, God, hylomorphism, philosophy, Sartre
53 Comments
Is God Just? And Where is Jesus?
In Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, ch. 52, here’s what Thomas Aquinas says is the sufficient reason for God withdrawing and withholding his protection from the descendants of Adam and Eve, leaving them exposed to dissolution (coming apart), degeneration, death, and … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, Jesus, original sin, perousia, Thomas Aquinas
1 Comment
Confidence Theists, Confidence Atheists, and Bayes’ Rule
As an agnostic, I think that both theists and atheists have reasons, some of them good, for believing what they do. It’s not just thoughtlessness or blind faith that causes someone to declare for theism or atheism. My issue is … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, Bayes' Rule, God, history, philosophy
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Jesus, Original Sin, the Sufficient Reason for Suffering, and Thomas Aquinas
Jesus came and was crucified two thousand years ago. Wasn’t that supposed to quell God’s wrath against humanity? Jesus was supposed to have gone up to heaven in a cloud with the intention of being back quickly. He’s still not … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, Jesus, original sin, philosophy, sufficient reason, Thomas Aquinas
24 Comments
David Berlinski defends God’s role in the Holocaust: “God did not protect his chosen people…[but] did…smite their enemies, with generations to come in mourning or obsessed by shame.”
Here’s David Berlinski defending God’s role in the Holocaust (from page 31 of his book, The Devil’s Delusion): “[T]he thousand year Reich…lies buried in the rubble of German cities smashed to smithereens,…[I]f God did not protect his chosen people precisely … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, david berlinski, God, philosophy, Sam Harris, the Holocaust, theodicy
4 Comments
If God is Rational, Whence the Holocaust and Competing Goods (Such as the Pursuit of Beauty over Ethics)?
Thomist philosopher Edward Feser prefers intellectualism (reason leading the will) to voluntarism (the will leading reason). He thinks that neither desire nor imagination should lead our wills, and claims that God, as the supremely rational being, ought to be our example: … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, edward feser, God, philosophy, the Holocaust, the moon, theodicy, theology
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The Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Holocaust
Here’s the problem concerning the principle of sufficient reason. If one posits that God has a good and sufficient reason for having allowed the Holocaust, the follow-up question obviously becomes, “Well, what is it?” Any particular answer proves woefully inadequate, ludicrous … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, philosophy, Shoah, the Holocaust
22 Comments
Is God A Brute Fact Or Does God Not Exist?
If God exists, why is there some Being rather than no Being? Put another way, with regard to the existence of contingent beings (“Why is there something rather than nothing?”), God presumably functions as the necessary and sufficient cause for … Continue reading
What I Believe
I’m an agnostic. No superstitions. No spooks. I think there’s one world. No evidence for minds apart from brains. The form of theism that seems vaguely plausible to me is simple deism. I think it’s logically possible that there is … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, philosophy, psychology, puja table, religion
1 Comment
The Stockholm Syndrome and Religion
The Stockholm Syndrome is where love and threat are coming from the same source; it’s a form of hostage taking, and it’s what religions do emotionally with people when they make God the source of love and acceptance if you … Continue reading
God and Evolution?
As an agnostic, I never have any problem with somebody who says, “13.7 billion year-old cosmos and evolution, yes, obviously, but not, ‘It all happened via the combination of chance and natural selection.’ Something more is up, and I think … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, creation, evolution, religion, science, young earth creationism
8 Comments
Un-Fricken-Believable
Seriously. __________ Okay, I have to comment. First, before you can even get this sort of logic going, Adam and Eve would need to have actually existed in a garden in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. They never did. Second, you’ve … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, Jesus, philosophy, psychology, reason
5 Comments
God Exists And Evil Is Always For The Best?
Sounding like Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide, the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser recently made the following statement at his blog: [I]t is not just God’s existence but also divine providence which can be known via purely philosophical arguments. Hence, even … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, edward feser, evil, God, philosophy, suffering, the Holocaust, theology
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Edward Feser Thinks God Flashed Fire Upon Elijah’s Sacrifice
Given the level of sophistication that the philosopher Edward Feser brings to his defense of medieval Thomism, I was somewhat taken aback recently to see him write at his blog the following: I think a divine cause was the source … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, edward feser, ethnic cleansing, God, philosophy, the Bible, william lane craig
7 Comments
God, The New Testament, And The Holocaust
It’s very, very hard to speak of God’s existence and of human history going according to a divine plan after the Holocaust. In 1945, Theodore Adorno famously said that it’s absurd to write poetry after the Holocaust, and it seems … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, God, Holocaust, New Testament, philosophy, religion
23 Comments
Does the Truth Matter or Not?
Catholic Andrew Sullivan, in the context of reading the biblical scholar Bart Erhman’s new book, How Jesus Became God (Harper 2014), makes a crisp and refreshingly direct statement to his fellow biblical religionists who ignore expert consensus and the general … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, critical thinking, God, Jesus, philosophy, the Bible, truth
11 Comments
God or the Multiverse: Who or What Banged the Big Bang?
Physicists Andrei Linde and Alan Guth “distorted by gravitational waves.” (HuffPost image.) __________ Cosmic background radiation has long been considered by physicists to be the smoking gun evidence for the big bang, but what about the recent discovery of bent … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, astronomy, atheism, Big Bang, God, light, multiverse, physics, science
4 Comments
Prometheus Unbound 