Peter Boghossian, Faith, and Religious Epistemology

I've recently finished Peter Boghossian's book "A Manual for Creating Atheists".  I listened to it on Audiobook, which helped immensely with being able to get through the book with the way my life is going right now between my work levels and trying to be a father and husband at home.  I can listen while doing mundane tasks at work and while doing chores/exercise/commuting.  If anyone can recommend good intellectual atheist books on Audible I'd be appreciative.

If you've been following my blog, you'll have seen my last post on Faith as "Belief without Evidence" where I engaged Tom Gilson of ThinkingChristian.net and his argument about that not being a valid definition of the word as Christians understand it.

I realize now that my post and approach was a mistake. There's no point in trying to show how the the Christian bible could be read to support Boghossian's definition.  You're playing the interpretation game which is going to be subjective and the Christians will almost always have a way to interpret their way out of hairy passages.

Eventually though, as I got through A Manual for Creating Atheists and thinking on the common thread of responses to it from Christian Apologists Tom and Phil Vischer, I realized something rather important.

The Definition of Faith is A Giant Red Herring

Quick and Dirty: A potential defeater for the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

I wanted to throw up a quick post about an idea I have to try and refute Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.  This isn’t intended as a full rebuttal, but more of an idea for an approach to refute it. 

I’m actually looking for feedback on whether or not this approach works or is fundamentally flawed.

The thrust of his argument is that since evolution only selects based on adaptability we can't necessarily trust the reliability of our cognitive faculties on naturalism (the assumption that there is no god).

An example he uses is that of a human and a lion, the truth value of a human's belief's about lions is separate from whether or not those beliefs produce adaptable behavior.  On naturalism we have no reason to suppose our beliefs about a lion being dangerous and wanting to eat us, therefore we should run and hide from it. 

We similarly could have evolved the belief that we should run from the tiger because in order to make tigers happy you should run and hide from them.  The thought is that through the eyes of evolution, both sets of beliefs produce equivalent adaptability and so either could have been selected for.

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. 

The Münchhausen trilemma entails Secularism

Not too long ago I had a nice discussion with Jonathan Pearce that lead to his posting about the Münchhausen trilemma.

This is an interesting thing I picked up on while debating with a (surprisingly nice) Presuppositional Apologist. 

The interesting thing that came about was that once both theists and atheists come to accept the Münchhausen trilemma as the major issue in epistemology that it is, I think that secularism in terms of governance follows as a result.  This post is to explain why I think that to be the case.

It should be said that if you haven't read up on the Münchhausen trilemma, follow the links above to check it out before continuing with this article.

I was on Atheist Hangouts

Work and family life has been pretty crazy lately, so I'm a bit late in putting this up here for general sharing, especially since it's not hosted on my YouTube channel. 

I was on an Atheist Hangout hosted by Gamma Atheist last Thursday night.  It was a mock debate with Karlton George.

I have to say it was an absolute blast, and I really enjoyed interacting with Karl.  He's an apostate like me, and his former apologist credentials are absolutely spot on.  He was throwing out stuff so hard and fast on the first real exchange we had where he played the apologist that I come across as completely flummoxed.

I didn't do so well when trying to play the apologist in terms of free will, I just don't get their arguments there quite as well as I should.

I do want to thank Dave for hosting and having me on.  He does a TON of these hangouts and they're a good time, so check out his website and his YouTube channel.

There was a funny aside from all this.  I actually got on the Hangout all early to talk to Dave, prepped with a healthy glass of wine, and when I saw how messy my basement was with my wife making Halloween costumes, I was going to hang up a blanket to hide the basement. Well doing that, I moved over a empty DVD case, which then fell over when I turned around and completely shattered the glass my wine was in. 

I was lucky that this was early, I ended up ruining my keyboard and had to act fast to get the glass and wine cleaned up in about a 10 foot radius around everything.  I'm just lucky the wine didn't really get into my gaming computer and the server that sits right underneath it.  Dave probably got a good chuckle at the level of cursing going on after getting over the shock. :P