Arbitrary Marks

My friend Dru sent me this link which contains a summary of Alvin Plantinga’s argument against evolutionary naturalism. It’s an interesting proposal, one which I think has some connections to the earlier discussion here about radical translation.
The post at per Caritatem looks to be taken from a recent lecture (the author, Cynthia Nielson is a graduate student [...]

As I write this, an article on Buddhism, atheism and neuroscience is the top emailed article on the NY Times website.
In it, he makes a couple of interesting claims about the so-called “New Atheism” debates and where they’re probably headed. First, he thinks that “The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith [...]

Actually, it isn’t God, its iGod. I took a bit of a break from prepping for my Newberry Library class tomorrow night and thought I’d ask iGod if he understood Pseudo-Dionysius. You’d think he might, since the guy is going on about names for God.
The dialogue is below the fold. And it will explain the [...]

Jesus and Mo have discovered Al Plantinga and the results are, as usual, hysterical. Maybe, like Richard Dawkins, my temporal lobe is just not sensitive enough to the magnetic vibrations of the Almighty?
My Newberry Library course began this past Thursday and I have a phenomenal group of 18 people who signed up to slog through [...]

Frequently, you’ll hear people claim that atheists are vitriolic and essentially the flip side of Christian fundamentalism. In response, atheists generally cite the fact that, putting tone aside, the nature of their beliefs is different: they require evidence while Christians require only faith.
Fine as far as that goes. However, I think that there is a [...]

Longtime readers, especially those who come here through UUpdates, may notice that I haven’t been writing much on specifically Unitarian Universalist topics. There’s a reason for that which I’d like to explore. No, I haven’t decided to return to Christianity or to convert to Mahayana Buddhism. In fact, I’ve just found a church in Chicago [...]

What kind of evidence would we expect to a perfectly loving god to give of its existence?
This question has been posed to me by my philosophy of religion professor. I balk at questions where I think that the outcome has been partially required by the structure: in this instance, it seems that god must [...]

Via 3QuarksDaily comes more conversation about god and god’s existence. Comments there immediately pointed out how boring this media tug-of-war is. Haven’t we all made up our mind by now? Aren’t the arguments tiresome?

My reaction is to wonder if there is anything new under the sun (setting Ecclesiastes aside for a moment) on this topic. One of the questions is whether we’re going about this debate all wrong. Is god just one fact among many, an entity whose existence we can prove or disprove? And is the argument tiresome because nothing is really at stake in the image of god we’re haggling over?

Salon.com has a great article on Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker, who are partnered and influence one another’s academic work (philosophy and cognitive psychology, respectively). Below is a short excerpt where they discuss David Chalmers and Sam Harris on science and the brain–a topic which they think is central to the question of “science versus religion”:

The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy article about Anthony Flew’s conversion to Aristotelian deism and the individuals (Christian and atheist) tugging at either side of him.  Says the author, “Intellectuals, even more than the rest of us, like to believe that they reach conclusions solely through study and reflection. But like the rest [...]