The first one you'll see is a link to an offsite paper, linked directly here: Atheist Morality Without God.
This essay is a response to James Sterba's "An Ethics without God that is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution" and thoroughly provides a secular morality in that it argues that the most reasonable ethics are secular systems that don't require a God, gods, or goddesses. Loftus further goes on to defend an atheist morality by appealing to polls that show that there is a common neighborly morality that matters to most people based in facts about who we are as a species, which includes facts about the prehistoric world. Finally, Loftus argues that 'Sterbaian ethics' succeeds in that it is useful for human flourishing.My most recent paper is Assessing McIntosh's Sophisticated Defense of Miracles. Here's the abstract:
In a previous paper Don McIntosh showed an exceptional awareness of the major objections to belief in miracles. In his attempt at a comprehensive rebuttal to them, his first goal was to argue that there are no fixed, exceptionless laws of nature, and thus nothing to prevent reasonable people from accepting miracle reports from reliable witnesses. His second goal was to argue that miracles are best understood as divine activity that merely defies our expectations and so miracles are akin to “signs” and “wonders.” His final goal was to offer a positive case for miracles that doesn’t lean on human testimony, which is generally considered weak as part of a defense of belief in miracles. Here McIntosh defended three categories: (1) miracles of cosmology; (2) miracles of prophecy; and (3) miracles of experience.In this reply John W. Loftus offers a comprehensive rebuttal to McIntosh. Loftus argues that there are regularities of nature on a mega scale that can be described by many essential equations, and that this should be good enough. To deny the existence of the laws of nature raises twin problems. On the one hand, such a denial would open the flood gates to include false miracle claims in the absence of any way to check them against laws of nature. On the other hand, such denial would undercut the basis for belief in biblical miracles since it would concede that biblical authors didn’t require solid evidence for their occurrence. Loftus goes on to argue that this is exactly what we find in the Bible—unevidenced, superstitious miracle stories. Finally, he concludes that McIntosh’s miracles of cosmology are based on a kind of ignorance, as are the alleged Hebrew Bible prophecies of the promised land, and McIntosh’s conclusions from his own personal testimony.
In this paper I canvass a variety of ideas throughout the Christian Bible that make no sense at all. These include God's unembodiment, timelessness, foreknowledge, and human characteristics like longing and tribalism, as well as the idea of divine inspiration, the Trinity, the existence of Satan, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Heaven and Hell, punishment for sin, the task of evangelism, and the need for apologetics. These epitomize what Jeremy Bentham famously called nonsense upon stilts.











