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Entries Tagged as 'Bad Reasoning'

Religion, Science, 9/11 and the Moon: Dawkins’ Response to Copan

March 9th, 2011 107 Comments

Parchment and Pen, has an audio of a brief exchange between Paul Copan and Richard Dawkins who was speaking in Ft. Lauderdale at Nova Southeastern University on “The Fact of Evolution.” (The following week, Paul Copan spoke on “The Fact of God” at Nova Southeastern and gave a direct response to Dawkins.) This MP3 of Paul Copan and [...]

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Hoist with one’s own petard

February 24th, 2011 28 Comments

When a Christian says that all other religions are false, he is deemed narrow minded. When an atheist says that all religions are false, she is deemed open minded.      

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The Sceptic and the Scientist: Ed Feser on Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers

February 20th, 2011 39 Comments

He is not one to pull punches and true to form, in To a Louse, Ed Feser holds a mirror up to the kind of reasoning that is all too common amongst Dawkins and Myers fans with this fictional dialogue between a scientist and a science sceptic; Skeptic: Science is BS. Physicists believe in these things [...]

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Once Upon an A Priori…

January 22nd, 2011 15 Comments

To formulate a statement that reduces a universal domain that includes myself and my thoughts or statements, to one or more factors that affect truth-value domain-wide, I must nevertheless transcend that universal domain so that I can make that factor-exempt statement itself, as well as any factor-exempt arguments that I might want to offer for [...]

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Oprah Winfrey, Religious Pluralism and Woolly Thinking

December 24th, 2010 19 Comments

I once caught 5 minutes of Oprah discussing religion. She made the comment, in a very sage-sounding tone, that she believed all religions are true. The audience immediately interrupted her with resounding applause; camera shots caught audience members nodding in approval, clearly impressed with the wisdom of the claim just made. This commonly heard platitude [...]

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Turning the Tables

November 17th, 2010 20 Comments

“The gentleman in the red shirt” shows us a simple lesson in why you should think through what your argument entails before you state it on national television and in front of a live audience. Too often we get tied up in knots trying to answer all the objections hurled at us, especially the specious [...]

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What Atheists Could Learn from Legal Interpretation 101

October 7th, 2010 117 Comments

At the beginning of each semester my lecturers would remind students of the fire policy, “if the alarm sounds leave the lecture theatre immediately through the nearest exit and reassemble outside the Davis law library.” Now if during class one day my lecturer had said to me, “Madeleine, do not leave class today until you [...]

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There’s Probably No God? Fisking Atheist Billboards

July 12th, 2010 401 Comments

On the way back from Bloggers drinks we drove past one of the controversial atheist advertising billboards, put up by NZ Atheist Campaign, The Humanist Society and NZARH, which have appeared around Auckland. This appears to have come on the back of the Richard Dawkins inspired bus advertising that made headlines earlier this year. It [...]

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A Response to The Dunedin School’s “Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and So-Called ‘Counter-Examples’”

January 2nd, 2010 9 Comments

In my previous post, A Response to The Dunedin School’s “Thinking in Tatters: Moral Relativism and Hidden Objectivist Assumptions”, I addressed some criticisms levelled at a talk I gave on moral relativsm by Deane from The Dunedin School (TDS) blog. In a follow up post, which, once again, I cannot link directly too as TDS [...]

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