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Robin: Jaime, what bothers me about your atheism is that it’s so dogmatic. You claim to know there is no God. That’s so arrogant. Jaime: Yes, I claim to know there are no gods. But I don’t claim it dogmatically or arrogantly. I claim it based upon the fact that the evidence is overwhelmingly against [...]
Archive for the ‘God’ Category
Is It Just A Mystery Whether God Exists?
February 16th, 2012 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, God, God, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism 
Tags: Agnostic Theism, Believing by Faith, Can We Know There Is No God?, Dogmatic Atheism, Faith vs. Knowledge, Gnostic Atheism, God and the Mystery Excuse, God is a Mystery, Is God Just A Mystery?, Knowing There Is No God, Metaphysics, Mystery, Mystery vs. Pseudomystery, What is a mystery? 
70 Comments »God and Goodness
January 30th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Robin: Look, I get it, Jaime. As an atheist, you think that God’s wisdom is foolishness, that God’s righteousness is wickedness, and that the bloody death of Jesus on the cross is hateful and ugly rather than the epitome of love and beauty that Christians like I think it is. The Bible makes it very [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Authority, Authority, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Ethics, God, God, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy Of Religion, Problem of Evil, Problem of Evil, Rationalism, Religion, Religion Tags: Divine Command Theory, God and Goodness, God's goodness, Theological Voluntarism 26 Comments »Hell As The Absence of God
January 29th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Robin: I know you don’t want to hear it, but Jesus loves you, Jaime. Jaime: Yes, yes, a man who either never existed or who is long dead and rotted by now loves me—and will torture me in hell forever if I don’t worship him, of course. Robin: He just wants you to love him but [...]
Posted in Atheism, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism Tags: God as Goodness, Goodness, Hell as Absence of God 84 Comments »Atheism and the Sacred: Being-Itself
December 22nd, 2011 Eric Steinhart Paul Tillich defined God as being-itself. He argued that being-itself is not any being; it is not a thing, and it does not even exist. For Tillich, being-itself transcends existence. It cannot be identified with any being (neither with any particular nor with any universal). It cannot be located within the categories of any ontology [...]
A Few Christian Replies to Hitchens’s Death Worth Noting
December 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Shortly before Christopher Hitchens’s death, Andrew Sullivan movingly reminisced about him and gave a sense of how their friendship was so strong despite such differing views on faith:
Thoughts and Questions About Obama
December 11th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Before Obama, America had not elected as president a legislator, either a congressperson or a senator, for decades. We have consistently preferred governors, vice presidents, and generals. Now in electing Obama we have a legislator, law professor, and grass roots organizer. We have someone whose skills are building consensus, managing intricate relationships with allies and enemies, [...]
Dan Barker Makes Sense of the Gospel Message
December 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke I know Dan Barker claims to be only a former Christian minister but he still has a gift for bringing the Gospel message alive in a fresh, new way that makes powerful sense of it. It’s weird it would take an atheist’s description to make me see angles in the story of salvation which I [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Christianity, Christianity, God, God, Hilarious, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Religulous, Religulous, Satire, Satire 3 Comments »Learning About Love From The Bible
November 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Using the “New Comprehensive Self-Referencing, Taking The Words on the Page To Mean What They Actually Say Version” of the Bible (that’s the NCSRTTWOTPTMWTASV), NonStampCollector shows us how the biblical God of love (the God who is love) models and illuminates for us all the virtues of love described in 1 Corinthians 13: Your Thoughts?
Internecine War At Freethought Blogs: Philosopher vs. “Redneck” Edition: Free Will And The Real World Smackdown
September 10th, 2011 Daniel Fincke As far as I have noticed, there has not been a blog war between any of the Freethought Blogs (or, er, since we all moved here anyway) so I was a little trepidatious of going and picking apart the every word of a quick comment on one of my posts by my new favorite blogger, Hank [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Autonomy, Autonomy, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Ethics, Ethics, Faith, Faith, God, God, Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Mind, Psychology, Psychology, Social Psychology, Social Psychology Tags: Free Will 19 Comments »20 Christian Academics Speaking About God
September 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke So many religious believers I encounter want to cite the existence of smart religious people as proof enough that their beliefs are rational. Below is a video just demonstrating how unintelligible, contradictory, or explicitly anti-reason many otherwise brilliant and highly credentialed scholars sound when they start actually explaining the religious beliefs that laypeople want to [...]
What I Think About The Existence of God
September 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke In my “What I Think About” series, I am providing a compendium for my blogging up until now on key issues in atheism, philosophy of religion, and moral philosophy. In each post, I provide a short summary of my key positions and then offer links to the posts where I argue in greater depth for [...]
“And There Are No Christians In Med School”
August 30th, 2011 Daniel Fincke I have an idea. In the future whenever you hear someone falsely say that there are no atheists in foxholes, don’t disagree with them. Don’t point out to them that this insults the bravery of countless non-theist soldiers by implying that without belief in God and an afterlife no one would ever courageously put his [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Divine Intervention, Divine Intervention, Faith, Faith, God, God, Jesus, Jesus, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Prayer, Prayer, Problem of Evil, Problem of Evil, Psychology, Psychology, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Skepticism, Skepticism 5 Comments »Gays, Jesus, and Judging
July 6th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In response to my earlier post praising a young Christian man who reached out with love to what he thought was a lesbian couple being berated by a cruel and judgmental waitress, Justin writes: Not to point out the obvious, but homosexuality is a sin, You have indeed not pointed out anything obvious. Homosexuality is [...]
Posted in Christianity, Christianity, Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Ethics, Ethics, Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, God, God, Homophobia, Homophobia, Homosexuality, Homosexuality, Jesus, Jesus, LGBTQAA, Morality, Morality, Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion Tags: Immoralism, Moral Reformation, Moral Reformers 2 Comments »Asking Richard Wade About How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy
July 4th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In three previous posts, the Friendly Atheist’s advice columnist Richard Wade and I have discussed the origins of his “Ask Richard” column, the nature of family conflicts over atheism, and whether atheists should replace religious identities with self-consciously atheistic ones. Along the way, Richard compared religion to heroin. In what follows I take that as an opening [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Featured, God, God, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Psychology, Psychology, Religion, Religion, Secularism, Social Psychology, Social Psychology Tags: Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous and Religion, Alcoholism, Higher Being 21 Comments »It's Atheism, Not Adeism
June 26th, 2011 Daniel Fincke As I have expressed a number of times in the past, I am a gnostic atheist. I am an atheist in the sense that I neither believe in nor worship, appease, pray to, or in any other way imagine myself to interact with personal gods. Simply lacking such belief and refraining from related practices is [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Atheism, Featured, God, God, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion Tags: Agnostic Atheist, Agnosticism, Deism, Gnostic Atheist 12 Comments »Einstein On God And Religion
April 19th, 2011 Daniel Fincke A nice set of quotes setting the record straight: I’m not crazy about his NOMA-like tacit approval of religion having a say in values. Your Thoughts?
On God And The Japanese Earthquake
March 16th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Edward Tarte says everything that shouldn’t need to be said on the topic, but sadly does: The word poison is a bit unnecessarily strong, but the rest is spot on. Your Thoughts?
The Secret Agreement between Atheists and Theists
February 27th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Atheists and theists have a strange secret agreement. You can see it if you look at the way they treat the arguments for God, like the cosmological argument. The theists say: (1) If the reasoning in the cosmological argument is correct, then God exists. (2) The reasoning in the cosmological argument is [...]
How An Omniscient Being Would Fulfill The Desire To Be Known Completely
February 22nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Jean-Paul Sartre reasoned that the loss of belief in God causes an existential feeling of abandonment. He was referring to our losing the potential for divine guidance but Jon Adams’s feeling of abandonment is a new one to me. He wishes he could still believe there was someone up there who knew him completely: Atheist [...]
Defending The Apparent Truth Of Evolution's Mindlessness
February 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke Last Christmas Eve, I argued that the belief that God “guided evolution” was not a rationally respectable way to reconcile science with faith but rather it was essentially an effective denial of the theory of natural selection, in its scientifically explanatory sense. Part of the revolutionary character of the discovery of evolution by natural selection [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Biology, Biology, Creationism, Creationism, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, Evolution, Evolution, Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, God, God, Historical Philosophy, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Science, Secularism Tags: Alvin Plantinga, Eugenie Scott, Huston Smith, Jerry Coyne, National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), National Center for Science Education (NCSE) 4 Comments »Darwin's Birthdaily Hilarity: Creationism
February 12th, 2011 Daniel Fincke DarkMatter2525 sums up creationism: Your Thoughts?
Posted in Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Comedy, Comedy, Creationism, Creationism, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, God, God, Parody, Parody, Religion, Religious Satire, Religious Satire, Satire, Satire No Comments »How Belief In "Theistic Evolution" Is Nearly As Much A Denial Of Science As Creationism
February 12th, 2011 Daniel Fincke The following is a repost from December 24, 2010: One often hears the refrain that it’s possible to believe in both God and evolution. And it is in fact true, both psychologically and, more importantly, logically, that one may both believe in God and in evolution. Psychologically we have ample evidence that plenty of people [...]
Another Middle Eastern Dictator's Regime Is Threatened
February 9th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Yahweh is the latest under siege by a young, freedom movement: Speculation has been growing about whether God’s dictatorship will be the next to crumble under the demand for freedom that is sweeping the earth. Yahweh has now ruled without free elections for over 2,000 years. He seized power after the assassination of his son, [...]
Posted in Christianity, Christianity, Comedy, Comedy, God, God, Hilarious, Parody, Parody, Religion, Religion, Religious Satire, Religious Satire, Satire, Satire, Theocracy, Theocracy, Theocrats, Theocrats 1 Comment »Pat Tillman In Hell? (Or "How NOT To Proselytize")
February 9th, 2011 Daniel Fincke John writes in to trivialize the tragic death of Pat Tillman because he was *gasp*—an atheist: I wanted to leave a comment about Pat Tillmans death in afganistan, while it is tragic, the greater tragedy is that if he was an athiest, He died not knowing ( or not believing )that Jesus died on the [...]
The Positive Content of Atheism
February 7th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers recently wrote about being irked by “Dictionary Atheists”. He doesn’t like it when people say that atheism means nothing more than denying God. His post is long, but I just want to focus on the issue of the meaning of atheism: why complain about dictionary atheists? After [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Authority, Featured, God, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy, PZ Myers, Religion, Secularism 8 Comments »
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