New Zealand motorists will have noticed a new genre of advertising billboards, those attempting to sell the concept that there is probably no God. These billboards are the collective efforts of the New Zealand Atheist Campaign, The Humanist Society and the New Zealand Association of Rationalist Humanists. Like all advertising campaigns, these billboards offer clever-sounding [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Atheism'
Contra Mundum: Selling Atheism
September 2nd, 2010 23 Comments
Tags: Atheism · Contra Mundum · Investigate Magazine · NZ Atheist Campaign · NZARH · The Humanist Society
Contra Mundum: Richard Dawkins and Open Mindedness
May 6th, 2010 140 Comments
The bold statement “Richard Dawkins opens minds” leaped out at me from the newsletter sitting on the University of Auckland’s Law Library counter. The article went on to sing the praises of Richard Dawkins and mentioned his book The God Delusion. On reading the piece one could be forgiven for concluding that Dawkins’ works are [...]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Atheism · Contra Mundum · Faith and Reason · Investigate Magazine · Nicholas Wolterstorff · Peter Van Inwagen · Richard Dawkins · Richard Swinburne · Science and Religion · The God Delusion · William Alston · William Lane Craig
Weight Watchers and the Historical Atrocities Argument
July 8th, 2009 6 Comments
We’ve all heard the slogan that atheism is superior to theism because of all the atrocities committed in the name of religion. If you flick through the pages of the new-atheist publications by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, Loftus, Harris, et al you’ll probably find some version of this assertion in each. Setting aside the [...]
Tags: Atheism · Christian History · Religious History · Thinking Matters
John Loftus on Madeleine Flannagan and Women and Other Red Herrings
July 1st, 2009 7 Comments
A few days ago I posted, Sunday Study: Slavery, John Locke and the Bible; in this post I defended an argument proposed by John Locke that the Bible does not support slavery. In that article I quoted from John Loftus’ book “Why I Became an Atheist” as an example of what is typically meant by [...]
Tags: Atheism · Christian History · Ethics · John Loftus · Religious History · Theology
Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part II
May 27th, 2009 3 Comments
In my last post, Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part I, I sketched Tooley’s distinction between a deontological and an axiological argument from evil and argued that Tooley rejects the axiological version because it rests on controversial ethical claims that are likely to be rejected by many theists. I outlined Tooley’s deontological [...]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Atheism · Divine Command Theory · Michael Tooley · Philosophy of Religion · Problem of Evil · William Alston
Tooley, Plantinga and the Deontological Argument from Evil Part I
May 13th, 2009 2 Comments
This two-part series criticises the deontological argument from evil proposed by Micheal Tooley in The Knowledge of God, the print debate between him and Alvin Plantinga.1 My critique proceeds in four parts. Initially I will sketch Tooley’s distinction between a deontological and an axiological argument from evil and will argue that Tooley rejects the axiological [...]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Atheism · Divine Command Theory · Michael Tooley · Philosophy of Religion · Problem of Evil · William Alston
John W. Loftus on The Christian Illusion of Moral Superiority Part II
May 8th, 2009 2 Comments
In my previous post, John W. Loftus on The Christian Illusion of Moral Superiority Part I, I argued that Loftus’ position was based on a confusion between ontological and epistemological foundations. I will now address his arguments against divine command theory. Loftus’ Arguments Against a Divine Command Theory After misconstruing the divine command theory as [...]
Tags: Alvin Plantinga · Atheism · Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · John Loftus · Robert Adams · William Wrainwright
John W. Loftus on The Christian Illusion of Moral Superiority Part I
May 7th, 2009 12 Comments
Several Christian thinkers, most notably, C S Lewis, John Hare, Robert Adams and William Lane Craig have argued that Theism provides a superior foundation for moral obligation than Naturalism does. Most of these thinkers defend this notion by developing and defending a divine command theory.[1] John W Loftus is aware of this and in The [...]
Tags: Atheism · Divine Command Theory · God and Morality · John Loftus · Philip Quinn · Robert Adams · Stephen Evans · William Alston
Divine Commands and Intuitions: A Response to Ken Perrott
May 5th, 2009 34 Comments
Ken Perrott from Open Parachute has asked me some questions about my views on morality and divine commands. Views I have repeatedly expressed on this blog. Given that others have from time to time asked me similar questions, and given the length of my response, I have decided to turn my answers into a post. [...]
Tags: Atheism · Bad Reasoning · Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality
With God Anything can be Permitted: Another Bad Argument against Theistic Morality
April 28th, 2009 30 Comments
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov’s famously contended that if God does not exist then anything is permissible. Ken over at Open Parachute disagrees and goes one step further and argues that the shoe is on the other foot. Ken maintains that theistic accounts of obligation lead to an “extreme form of moral relativism” and in fact, Dostoevsky’s [...]
Tags: Atheism · Bad Reasoning · Divine Command Theory · Ethics · God and Morality
