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Although there is some empirical justification for the Principles of Sufficient Reason and Plenitude, much of the discussion of the logic of creation and evolution by rational selection has been highly abstract. It has been a priori; a matter of pure reason. But it is reasonable to demand empirical justification for those metaphysical theories. To [...]
Archive for the ‘Cosmology’ Category
Two Arguments for Evolution by Rational Selection
January 1st, 2012 
Eric Steinhart On Evolution by Rational Selection
January 1st, 2012 Eric Steinhart Almost all atheists are surely aware of Darwinian evolution, which is evolution by natural selection, and which explains the history of life on earth. Universal Darwinism is the thesis that evolutionary principles operate beyond earthly biology. Of course, not all things have genes or compete for survival in ecosystems. More general evolutionary theories need not [...]
The Logic of Creation
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart At a very high level of abstraction, Sabin characterizes the god and goddess as symbols for two aspects of natural creative power (natura naturans, being-itself as the power to be). She says that “The God represents, among other things, power unmanifest; the spark of life. The Goddess gives this power form” (2011: 117). We experience [...]
Posted in Atheism, Cosmology, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion and Science, Wicca 
15 Comments »Creation Stories
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart Many religions have creation stories. The Judeo-Christian creation stories are found in the first chapters of Genesis, which is the first book of the Bible. There is no need to repeat the Genesis stories here. It can be agreed that there are some metaphorical or analogical correspondences between the Genesis stories and our best science. [...]
On Evolution
August 9th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart A process atheist is someone who agrees that every question that used to be answered by appealing to God can be better answered by appealing to some form of evolution. So you might wonder about the meaning of the term evolution. Since the term evolution is abstract, it’s definition will be abstract: [...]
Loveliness is Rare
August 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Order, complexity, regularity, patterning, are all examples of features that I’ll just refer to as lovely. It’s a term of art, and it’s a lovely term. Within many familiar systems, loveliness is very very rare. It’s very rare within the models of simple physical theories and even more rare within the models [...]
Posted in Atheism, Cosmology, Featured, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Science, Uncategorized 5 Comments »Contra-Steinhart: Why We Should Not Identify As "Evolutionists"
July 31st, 2011 Daniel Fincke While I agree with Eric Steinhart’s claims that atheists need to take metaphysics seriously and while I would be open to considering evolutionary models for answering metaphysical, ethical, and cosmological questions if they are promising, below I am going to briefly surmise several serious reservations I have to Eric’s suggestions that we ditch the term [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Biology, Biology, Cosmology, Cosmology, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Disambiguating Faith, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, Evolution, Evolution, Faith, Faith, Featured, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Secularism 5 Comments »Atheistic Design Arguments
March 7th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart All design arguments reason from the organization in our universe to the existence of some divine designer. What does this designer do? Design implies deliberate selection from a plurality of alternative possibilities. It cannot be selection from one possibility nor can it be random selection. It has to be rational selection. According [...]
The Atheistic Fine Tuning Argument
March 6th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Every one of the standard arguments for the existence of God can be reformulated as an argument against the existence of God. Consider the Fine Tuning Argument. The theistic version of the Fine Tuning Argument goes like this: (1) The Fine Tuning Argument is sound. (2) If the Fine Tuning Argument is [...]
Physics is Grounded in Mathematics
March 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Mathematics is effective in science. Wigner (1960: 14) regards this effectiveness as magical: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” The prudent reply that it is surely not very scientific to [...]
Can Atheists do Math?
March 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Leibniz’s version of the cosmological argument (his Sufficient Reason Argument) runs from the continency of our universe to the existence of some necessary being. This necessary being is the ground of our universe. The ground isn’t part of our universe – it stands in no spatial, temporal, or causal relation to any [...]
Atheism and Leibniz
February 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart The cosmological argument is really a family of arguments. Some of the cosmological arguments are very concrete. Aquinas’s Second Way and the Kalam Argument (popularized by William Lane Craig) reason back to some first cause of the universe at the beginning of time. Atheists (like Quentin Smith) have given various replies to [...]
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 [...]
The Simulation Hypothesis
February 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Atheists can use the traditional arguments for God in strange new ways. There’s no reason to reject those arguments – on the contrary, I think they should be carefully studied, and their flaws should be repaired. But I don’t think they lead to God. I love the Cosmological Arguments. And the ones [...]
Why Materialism is Unscientific
February 10th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart You’ve probably heard the old question: Why is there something rather than nothing? It’s unfortunate when theists screw this up. They say: Because God created the universe! Of course, since God is something, you can’t use God to answer the question. The universe coming from God is just something from something. And [...]
Cat Faber's "The Words Of God"
February 6th, 2011 Daniel Fincke This is another, meditative Sunday afternoon song, each of I’ve lifted from either this post or its comments section). This one though is not satirical and should be genuinely amenable to the more sophisticated theist (or pantheist or other believer in a philosopher’s god of some sort), who wants more God in her view of [...]
Scientists’ Spiritualities As Alternative Models Of Religiosity
January 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In my last post, I made clear that I am by no means an “accommodationist” who wants to let religious claims to hegemony over ethics, metaphysics, or epistemology go unchallenged as part of a deal whereby it agrees to either cooperate with or, minimally, not interfere with science education and science-based public policy. In a [...]
Posted in Astronomy, Astronomy, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Biology, Biology, Cosmology, Cosmology, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Featured, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Religious Secularism, Religious Secularism, Science, Science, Secularism 
Tags: Accomodationism, Adam Frank, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Chris Mooney, E. O. Wilson, Elaine Howard Ecklund, James Moore, Peter Doherty, Rudolf Otto, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, The Origin of Species, The Voyage of the Beagle 4 Comments »How Belief In “Theistic Evolution” Is Nearly As Much A Denial Of Science As Creationism
December 24th, 2010 Daniel Fincke 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 believe in both and logically it is clear that [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheism, Biology, Biology, Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens, Cosmology, Cosmology, Creationism, Creationism, Divine Intervention, Divine Intervention, Evolution, Evolution, Featured, God, God, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Science, Secularism 12 Comments »The (Jesuit) Father Of The Big Bang Theory
December 24th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Recently, on Facebook, I boiled down my philosophical and scientific objections to theistic evolution to pithy status update size and received a good deal of discussion as a result. I plan to edit, reprint, and possibly expand upon my remarks on theistic evolution on Camels With Hammers soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Cosmology, Cosmology, Featured, God, God, Physics, Physics, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Science Tags: Albert Einstein, Big Bang Theory, Georges Lemaître No Comments »No, I’m Not An Atheist By Faith, Here Are My Arguments.
June 29th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Yesterday Ron Rosenbaum aggressively attacked atheism and defended agnosticism in Slate. He starts out with the familiar charge that atheists have “faith”. But faith in what? Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the [...]
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, Cosmology, Cosmology, Disambiguating Faith, Disambiguating Faith, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Ethics, Evidence, Evidence, Faith, Faith, Featured, God, God, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Physics, Physics, Religion, Religion 41 Comments »Debunking A Creationist Documentary Error By Error
September 19th, 2009 Daniel Fincke djarm67, a scientifically literate theist, presents the creationist A Questions of Origins while correcting each distortion, oversimplification, and error as it occurs: There are six parts, watch them all if you have the time. Your Thoughts?
Posted in Astronomy, Biology, Cosmology, Creationism, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Physics, Religion and Science, Science Tags: Anthropic Principle, Big Bang No Comments »Definitions, Maths, Big Bang, and Fables
September 7th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Some nice meat and potatoes refutation of predictable Christian arguments. What I found worth highlighting in particular here on the blog was akegg’s adept way of addressing the question of what the Big Bang is said to demonstrate. Your Thoughts?
Physicist Steven Weinberg On The Question Of God
September 5th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Your Thoughts?
On The Possible God Of Philosophy And Cosmology Vs. The Personal, Historical God Of Faith
September 5th, 2009 Daniel Fincke This post is inspired by some excellent remarks from Daniel Dennett in reply to William Lane Craig’s vigorous cosmological arguments for the existence of God (which you can see him make in a separate debate here). Here is the Dennett video, below it you’ll find a rough transcript I have produced of it, and then [...]
Posted in Atheism, Christianity, Cosmology, Daniel Dennett, Faith, Featured, God, Philosophy, Religion, Videos, Why I Am Not A Christian Tags: Deism, Ground of all being, Literal Interpretations of Religion, Metaphorical Interpretations of Religion, Myth, Religious Anthropomorphism, Superstition, William Lane Craig 6 Comments »Is The Idea Of “Nothing” Illusory?
August 25th, 2009 Daniel Fincke I was thinking about the argument for the existence of God that hinges on the question of how something could come from nothing. And I wondered, is nothing even an intelligible concept? Everything we experience is something. We have a concept of zero since we can imagine there being zero of some particular thing either [...]
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