A List of Things Christians Have Been Against

This is interesting from the hand of Ed Babinski.

Science Education is No Guarantee of Skepticism

That's Right.

Playing God: The Loving Psychopath

The Quest to Keep Jesus Relevant

[Written by Joe Holman]

The next time you drive around the historic part of your neighborhood, slow down just enough to get a look at the old-time churches. They’re big and old, especially old. Hell, some of them are so old that if you had the right forensic testing kit, you might genetically match the dried tears of a hand-and-foot slave as he waited on his master, listening to the “nonsense” from the pulpit about some new movement called Abolition. How time flies!

"Do people with no faith have to take the test?"

Victor Reppert asked this, yet another spin on whether atheists should have to take the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF). But I want people to see the OTF as a solution to an incredible amount of religious diversity. This is a problem that needs a solution, you see. No other methods have worked before. The goal is to offer a fair test to find out which religion is true if there is one, and that means such a test should leave room for the possibility that no religion is true. If nothing else then, the OTF is a test for religion precisely because of religious diversity. If people cannot find solutions to problems within a business they hire solution specialists who offer ways to solve it. Mediators find ways to bring people together by offering ways they can see their differences in a better light. That's what the OTF does.

The Introduction to "The Outsider Test for Faith"

I'm progressing on my new book well enough to write my introduction to it. Here it is below:

What About Atheist Diversity?

As I'm writing my book on the Outsider Test for Faith let me put a question to my readers. It concerns the geographical distribution of atheism around the world.

Antony Flew's Presumption of Atheism and the OTF

Anthony Flew argued that believers in God have the burden of proof similar to the presumption of innocence found in our court systems. Given the extraordinary claims of religion and the fact of religious diversity the burden of proof is on the believer, just as it’s on the prosecutor in court room proceedings. [In God, Freedom, and Immortality: A Critical Analysis (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), which is an updated version found previously in The Presumption of Atheism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1976)]

More Criticisms From Dr. Reppert on the OTF

I do appreciate his relentless criticisms of my Outsider Test for Faith (OTF), even if he's trying to save his faith from refutation. See here. My comments are there as well. ;-)

More On Being Passionately Self-Promoting in an Oddly Humble Way

Dinesh D'Souza's new book is out, Godforsaken: Bad Things Happen. Is there a God who cares? Yes. Here's proof.In it he does not mention my arguments against a good omnipotent God, even though he has read my book Why I Became an Atheist, and said to me that it contained some things he "hadn't considered before." David Wood's chapter on the problem of evil in Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science,likewise ignores my work. I debated them both so they know of it. It's hard for me not to conclude that they are ignoring it because they cannot answer my arguments. ;-)

On Being Passionately Self-Promoting in an Oddly Humble Way

Since David Marshall describes me as "being passionately self-promoting in an oddly humble way," I thought I wouldn't disappoint him by doing it again. ;-) One thing I've noticed is that people are reading my anthologies The Christian Delusion (TCD) and The End of Christianity (TEC) more than my magnum opus Why I Became an Atheist (WIBA), probably because of the wonderful blurbs and contributors. So to help remedy this let me offer just three blurbs about WIBA:

It's Preposterous That Victor Reppert and David Marshall Believe in Allah

I'd like to note a reoccurring theme among Christian apologists. David Marshall has said with regard to Judaism that it is a true religion. He also claims:

Either God is one, many, or not at all. But one doesn't need to choose between Yahweh, Elohim, theos, Allah, and Shang Di: the one only-existing Creator God is recognizable under many aliases. Link

So also claims Dr. Reppert about Allah:

I believe that Allah exists. Allah is the Arabic word for God, just as Dios is Spanish for God, and Dieu is French for God, and Gott is German for God. I am a theist, therefore, I believe that Allah exists. No problem.

But all of this is simply empty rhetoric with no substance at all. Neither one of them are Orthodox Jews or Muslims so why would they say this?

Some Links For Your Enjoyment

Jerry A. Coyne on You Don't Have Free Will in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Victor Stenger on The God Hypothesis for the New Scientist.

An older interview I did for Think Atheist. A more recent interview about my massively revised book, Why I Became an Atheist, will be available April 8th.

Coming: A Book On "The Outsider Test for Faith"

Having just heard from my publisher that they want me to submit a proposal for a full length book treatment on The Outsider Test for Faith, I have commenced working on it. So this blog may be silent for days at a time as I write it. Stay tuned though. I'll be around. Subscribe by email, Feed, or become a follower so you don't miss a thing. I know people get tired of me requesting financial assistance, but as I work on this book I'm not focused on earning a living, so please consider supporting my efforts. Christian professors get paid to do what I must do as an independent scholar.

On Taking the Outsider Test for Faith (OTF)

On the one hand we have Christians who reject the OTF as unfair or faulty in some way, while on the other hand we have Christians claiming to embrace it who go on to say their faith passes the test. Why can't they agree? I suspect philosophically minded believers instinctively realize their faith won't pass the test so they try to find fault with it. And I suspect more ignorant believers will think their particular Christian sect passes the test. I've argued against the former group that they fail to understand what it is. And I've argued against the latter group that they don't really understand what it demands of them. See my counter-arguments by following this link to two additional ones.

In either case, whether you think the OTF is unfair, or whether you think your faith stands up to the OTF, you should get and read through my extensively revised book, Why I Became an Atheist. Read it to see if your faith is correct. It's available for purchase on Amazon as of today. See for yourself why so many people on both sides of our debates recommend it so highly. I tell people that if they've read the first edition and liked it they will love this massive revision. Prometheus Books is treating it as a new book, coming in at about 110 more pages with a new outline, better written arguments, and many chapters extensively re-written. It's head over heels better than the first edition. It's clearly my best book, my magnum opus. If you've read The Christian Delusion and The End of Christianity and haven't read this one then you haven't seen anything by comparison from me yet. ;-)

Plato's Cave Allegory and Faith

Plato's cave allegory is a good one applied to the issues that separate believers and non-believers. I know I'm in a culturally derived cave. So I can reflect on that which I have been led to accept since I realize I'm in it, and this makes all the difference in the world. My conclusion is that I can only trust science to tell me what I should accept. Doing so allows me to think outside the cave, to question the reality I was raised to believe. Believers raised in their respective religious cultures are in the cave and in denial. They have accepted and now defend what they were raised to believe using a double standard, one for their own faith and a different one for the faiths they reject. But the problem is faith. Believers all defend the merits of faith even though faith has no method.

Faith And Evidence According to Dr. Matt McCormick

Believers rail against the so-called New Atheists and atheistic scientists because they don't have a "correct" understanding of faith. What say they then about a philosopher of religion who says the same things about the "F" word in a recent lecture? Link

Jerry Coyne On Justifying Science

We justify science rather than faith as a way of finding out stuff not on the basis of first principles, but on the basis of which method actually gives us reliable information about the universe. And by “reliable,” I mean, methods that help us make verified predictions that advance our understanding of the world and produce practical consequences that aren’t possible with other methods. Take a disease like smallpox. It was once regarded as manifestations of God’s will or displeasure; indeed, inoculation was opposed on religious grounds—that to immunize people was to thwart God’s will. You can’t cure smallpox with such an attitude, or by praying for its disappearance. It was cured by scientific methods: the invention of inoculations, followed by the use of epidemiological methods to eradicate it completely. Scientific understanding advances with time; religious “ways of knowing,” even by the admission of theologians, don’t bring us any closer to the “truth” about God. We know not one iota more about the nature or character of God than we did in 1300, nor are we any closer to proving that a god exists! Link.

Quote of the Day, By Victor Stenger on Science vs Religion

Religion is a belief system based on bullshit. Link.

I received my copy of Stenger's newest book yesterday, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion.On the back cover I have a blurb that reads:

A tour de force. Among the published atheists trying to bridge the gap between scientifically minded people and people of faith Stenger is the best. I consider this book to be his best yet. I think it'll probably be a classic.

His book should be available shortly. Get it! Don't miss it. You can read all I said about it right here.

The Major Reason Why I Am a Skeptic

David Marshall continually says I must read up on world religions and the history of religions. But why? It's because he thinks it will help me to believe. So David, I'll grant that you have read more world literature than I have and that you have the benefit of world travel. But I think the brain is such that if I had your experiences and read only the works you have, I would agree with you and think like you. Our brains are like that. So in order to think like you I must be more like you (which also includes IQ, gender, race, sexuality, place and time of birth, and so forth--do you know that sociologists can identify different ideas held by people born in America during the 20's vs the 30's vs the 40's vs the 50's and so on?). BUT I AM NOT YOU! Nor can I ever be. The same thing goes in reverse for you. If you had my experiences and read only the works I have, you would agree with me and think like me. That is probably the major reason why I am a skeptic, because of this propensity of ours to believe and defend a host of ideas just because we were exposed to them, which is as obvious of an empirical fact as we can get. It's overwhelming that our respective cultures influence us, since that's what we're talking about. Just take four babies and raise one in China the other in Saudi Arabia the third in Kentucky and the fourth in Russia and you will see clearly how cultures influence us all. And it’s never more pronounced than when it comes to religion. Knowing this I must reject faith based reasoning of any kind. Knowing this I am skeptical of ideas that do not have sufficient evidence for them. Knowing this I try as best as I possibly can to only accept science based reasoning. Science is the only hope out of this epistemological morass. How can you possibly counter this? How can any believer counter this? Believers can only do so out of ignorance, pure ignorance, willful ignorance, a head-in-the-sand type of fear based ignorance.

David Marshall On the OTF Again

A new Christian ebook has hit the #2 spot of atheism categorized books on Amazon, True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism eds., Carson Weitnauer and Tom Gilson. The reason I was interested in looking at it was because David Marshall has a chapter in it on my Outsider Test for Faith (OTF). I wanted to see if Marshall did any better in his chapter for this book than what I saw on his blog which I subsequently reviewed in 4 parts. [Warning: Spoiler Alert. He didn't.] ;-)

Debate: PZ Myers and Greg M. Epstein on Religion

The topic was How Should Atheists Talk about Religion? Beginning around -42:11 PZ Myers has a string of invectives against faith. I'd like it if someone would type them out for us, as well as any other pithy comments of his (or Epstein's) in this lively debate. Myers is spot on about faith.

Reasonable Faith?!

Christian Professor Dan Lambert's Definition of Faith

Why can't Christians agree? The following is from an older email exchange Dan and I had.

On Feeding One's Faith in the "Conceivably False"

I recently saw a church sign that said, "Feed your faith and it will starve your doubts."