Faith is Belief without Good Evidence

It's been too long since I've engaged in some hardcore Counter Apologetics, but I'm on vacation and I've had the time to do a lot of reading lately.  This article is meant to be an in depth, but hopefully respectful critique of the Christian definition of faith by Tom Gilson.

There's been some back and forth on how the word faith is to be defined in light of Peter Boghossian's new book A Manual for Creating Atheists. 

The primary antagonist I've read defending faith is Christian Apologist Tom Gilson who writes at thinkingchristian.net.  To say the least, Tom has written rather extensively against the definitions of faith espoused by Boghossian, Loftus, Lindsay, and Coyne.

What's more is that I think he actually makes a few good points, including a few where I think I may agree with him over those four atheists whose work I admire greatly.  

Now I still  think Tom is wrong on the whole of it, and that's the focus of this post, but the devil is in the details.

The Real War on Christmas

There really is a “War on Christmas”, it’s just not what you think.

The “War on Christmas” is simply what religious conservatives call the culture war in late November and December.

The problem for religious conservatives is that it’s less a “War on Christmas” and more about the secular appropriation of Christmas. 

More specifically, it’s about the American culture becoming less religious but keeping the fun Christmas stuff that never really had anything to do with Christianity anyway.

Naturalism, Falsifiability, and Hiddenness

This post is a bit off the cuff, as it’s mainly in response to a Twitter conversation to elaborate on something you can’t put into a series of tweets.  This was born of a conversation with Alex and Elijiah, and the topic was meaty enough that I wanted to write about it.

The question is whether or not a-priori Naturalism is “reasonable” or at least “not scary”.  That’s basically the starting position in philosophy that: no matter what we observe, we would never accept evidence of something supernatural existing.   It’s rejecting the supernatural a-priori.

Personally, I kind of abhor this line of reasoning, or at least I find it terrible to be in a position where I’d say that there can never be evidence of any kind to prove the existence of a god or other supernatural entities.  

To me, this reeks of a sort of fundamentalism that I’d normally chastise certain religious people for practicing.