TreesNightly

Here's a line of questioning that undermines the entire field of apologetics. Do you believe an all-powerful being is possible? If so, can an all-powerful being deceive limited beings? Are you a limited being? Then how can you trust personal revelation, outside authority, historical records, physical evidence or anything that you feel supports your beliefs in a world with an all-powerful being? Any theist, by definition, would answer "yes" to question one. The answer to question two is necessarily "yes." I think we can all agree that three is a "yes,"especially in relation to an all-powerful being. Which leads us to question four. I recently asked this question to the Google+ community for the Christian Apologetics Alliance . In a world where a supernatural entity exists with the power to reveal knowledge to me or others directly or indirectly, how can I be sure that the same or different supernatural entity won't reveal false knowledge? Here is th...

At it�s heart, the cosmological argument for God says that anything that begins to exist must have a cause. Used in conjunction with the Big Bang Theory , apologists can rightly argue that our universe at least seems to have a point of origin and therefore a cause. As an atheist, I reject a supernatural creator that did not begin to exist...so, what caused the Big Bang? Well, I don�t know (which is a valid response .) I only know of scientifically informed options. Quantum foam. I can�t explain this better than Lawrence Krauss so I prefer that you come back after reading the book A Universe from Nothing or after watching a relevant lecture . The best layman explanation I can provide is that �nothing� (the absence of conventional matter, energy, space & time) is an unstable state and quantum fluctuations will give rise to something--even the singularity that became our universe. Self-Causation. Violated causality is a logic no-no, however, it is a valid interpretation of quantu...

The belief of a soul or spirit that can exist independent of a brain is a romantic idea that I don�t often go out of my way to debate. After all, believing that the essence of one�s identity continues after death is an understandable comfort to those dealing with mortality. That said, I�ve been asked recently why exactly I don�t believe in disembodied consciousness and figure that here is the perfect place to record my thoughts. Strictly speaking, this isn�t an atheist issue. The existence of a God doesn�t imply an afterlife nor does the absence of a deity imply that there can�t be a hereafter. The fact that the two beliefs are so often tied speaks to how religions have positioned themselves to appeal to desires in order to gain a following. By this I mean that a master who must be worshiped and a church that must be paid doesn�t fulfill many emotional wants, however, a master who can eternally reward worship and a church that serves as the proxy for heaven--that�s desirable to many. S...

Hat tip to Hausdorff for actually reading the damn thing.

Here�s a moral dilemma for the sci-fi fans. Consider a form of teleportation in which you can walk into a pod in Chicago where your body is deconstructed molecule by molecule providing the information that is used to make copies of those molecules to be built again at the chosen destination, let�s say Tokyo. While this a million times faster than any other mode of transportation, it�s legitimate to say that the you in Chicago painlessly and instantaneously died while a perfect clone of you was born in Tokyo. From the perspective of the new and now only you in Tokyo, it seems like you were �beamed-up� Star Trek style, with your last memory walking into the Chicago pod. From the perspective of the old you in Chicago, well, there is no longer a perspective to be had. Is this a morally acceptable technology to you? For well-adjusted atheists, I think it should be. For the most part, atheists don�t believe in souls. Post-deconstruction the teleporter is a non-entity, I needn�t worry that th...

The many possible outcomes of a Pascalian Wager render it useless. The 10 weirdest right-wing Xian conspiracy theories Vjack talks about Atheism+ and where it went wrong . Richard Dawkins had a short interview on The Daily Show, and a longer interview with Jon Stewart on-line . A great post for those wondering if a religion is harmful. Rosa Rubicondior's take on the censorship tendencies of religion . An atheist wonders if his rationalization to eat meat is religious in nature. An atheist thinking about the kind of theist he could be . And finally, a cartoon creationist needs representation .