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Posts from the ‘Atheism’ Category

Jul 21

13 Comments

Thinking your Way to Faith

A while back, I had a conversation with a young couple who had differing religious perspectives about how they anticipated raising future children. One of the options floated about was something like this: “We’ll just raise them ‘neutral’; we’ll expose them to as many religious and irreligious options as possible and let them make up their own minds.” Well, that sure sounds admirable enough. Give them the choice. Don’t stuff anything down their throats. No indoctrination or coercion whatsoever. What could be more honouring of the individuality and freedom of our children than that? Read more

Jul 1

8 Comments

Stuck in the Cave

It’s fairly common these days to see religious belief presented as a kind of primitive holdover from our superstitious past. So in that sense, yesterday’s article from the National Post‘s religion blog, “Holy Post” was nothing new. What was interesting was the angle Prof. Hank Davis has apparently taken in his book called Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in the Modern World. The objects of Davis’s criticism—what he sees as prime examples of “caveman logic”—are the purposive phrases we use in everyday life. “It was a sign,” “thank God,” even “good luck”—we use these phrases seemingly instinctively (in fact, Christians seem to have a whole separate arsenal of them: “it was a ‘God thing’,” “it’s all part of God’s plan,” etc.). But do they make any contact with what is objectively true? For Davis, the answer is obviously “no.” Read more

Jun 18

17 Comments

How Do We Know God?

A quick look at the calendar shows that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of a very happy day in my life—the completion of my thesis. This is probably one of those anniversaries that will remain significant in my mind only, but I figured it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the subject matter I spent sixteen months of my life reading/writing about. I’ve continued to follow the exploits of folks like Dawkins and Hitchens over the last year as well as those who “defend the faith” against them. Mostly, the tone and the content of the discussions have seemed fairly belligerent, sterile, and unhelpful to me. The same old arguments, the same old defenses. People on both sides simply dig in their heels, talk a little louder (or more condescendingly), and try to prove who’s really the smartest. All in all, it’s not very inspiring stuff. On this level, I do not miss the debate. Read more

Jun 8

16 Comments

Apatheism

A friend sent me a link to this article by CBC journalist Neil MacDonald last week.  Apparently, MacDonald locates himself within a growing minority that are increasingly finding the courage to “come out” as non-believers in a cultural milieu that frowns upon lack of professed religious belief (MacDonald is a Canadian living and working in the USA).  Unlike committed atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, however, MacDonald claims simply not to care about the matter. Read more

Mar 23

18 Comments

Good without God

I came across this article a few weeks back and was reminded of it today by a discussion of the age-old question of whether or not we need God to be good over at Jesus Creed. The author of the article offers an answer in the negative, citing the blissfully secular Scandinavian countries of Sweden and Denmark as shining examples that God is not necessary for human happiness and moral decency: Read more

Feb 9

6 Comments

Atheism on the Bus III

Well, it seems the bus wars are heating up across the pond, according to this article from Time (h/t: Paul).  Aside from being a rather depressing commentary on the state of our cultural discourse (for more on that, have a look here) and the imaginative capacities of a few Christian groups in the UK (“There definitely is a God.  So join the Christian party and enjoy your life?!”  Seriously?), the article is mildly interesting for two interesting quotes it contains.  First, here’s what Ariane Sherine had to say about what motivated her to spearhead the atheist bus ad campaign: Read more

Feb 3

11 Comments

Atheism on the Bus

A while back someone from our church asked me what I thought about the prospect of the atheist bus ads, brainchild of British writer Ariane Sherine and enthusiastically supported by that most zealous of atheist proselytizers Prof. Richard Dawkins, making their way into Canada (apparently Toronto and Calgary are in the works, while Halifax has deemed the ads too controversial for public consumption).  On the left, is the slogan currently appearing on buses in the UK, Madrid, Washington D.C., and which you may see on a bus in Canada in the not-too-distant future. Read more

Jun 27

6 Comments

Done!

Well, sixteen months of toil came to an end today as I finally submitted my thesis for grading. I can’t tell you how good it felt to plunk that big stack of paper down at the Regent front office today. I am very relieved to have this completed—it’s a huge load off my mind. For those who might (still) be wondering about what, exactly, I’ve been beavering away at for so long, I’ve reproduced the abstract below. If you’re interested enough to read more, drop me an email and I’ll send you a copy. Read more

Jun 12

6 Comments

A Shared Moral Universe

Well my thesis is mercifully coming closer to completion—I submitted the final chapter to my supervisor’s scalpel yesterday. After a year or so spent on the same topic, not to mention the ordinary frustrations of thesis-writing, the question of why I ever started this project sometimes occurs to me (apart from my requiring these credits to graduate). Atheism and the problem of evil. Not exactly the most inspiring or uplifting topics to immerse oneself in for a sustained period of time. Read more

May 23

Religion and Violence: An Interesting Conversation

Some friends are visiting from Alberta and we spent part of yesterday over at a market in North Vancouver. After a bit of shopping our friends’ kids were getting a little restless so we camped out in the play area for a while and let them run off some steam with the other kids. As we were sitting around watching the kids play, we struck up a conversation with a gentleman who was there taking care of his granddaughter. After a bit of pleasant small-talk, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to where everyone’s from and what they do. Read more

May 9

12 Comments

The Peculiar Human Organism

One of the central components of my thesis (which is, mercifully, coming closer to completion) is that the new atheist account of reality is not “deep” enough—it does not provide a rich or satisfying enough account of the phenomenology of being human. Huge swaths of human existential concerns are relegated to the realm of evolutionary peculiarities or “misfirings” in the attempt to squeeze everything into what John Haught has called an “explanatory monism” which assumes that one mode of explanation—the scientific one—is all we need. This reductive approach to human beings is then held alongside (awkwardly and incoherently, in my view) an arrogated moral authority in the attempt to discredit the very religious traditions which it is unwittingly borrowing from. Read more

Apr 22

4 Comments

A Strange Salvation

One of the dangers of choosing a thesis topic related to a relatively recent (and controversial) socio-cultural phenomenon is that there is invariably a lot of material produced on the subject that one should at least attempt to keep abreast of while writing. In the case of the phenomenon that is the new atheism, this is proving to be a monumental task. Read more

Apr 14

15 Comments

How Do You Know?

This weekend, a friend alerted me to an interesting DVD special where four of the more prominent atheists out there right now (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) get together for a round-table discussion. The two hour unmoderated discussion is, interestingly, entitled “The Four Horsemen“—a reference, presumably, to the protagonists’ understanding of themselves as the agents entrusted with the hastening of the demise of the blight upon human history that is religion.
Read more

Mar 29

9 Comments

Dostoevsky and Dawkins on the Significance of Origins

There are few things better than getting free books. Last week a friend of mine happened to find himself helping clean out the basement of James Houston (one of the founders of Regent College) and was rewarded with a stack of books for his troubles, some of which, due to my friend’s generosity, found their way into my hands. Among these books is Houston’s two-volume compilation of various “letters of faith” written down through the ages and arranged into a year-long collection of daily readings. Read more

Mar 7

40 Comments

The New Atheism as Inadequate Theodicy

Another shameless self-promotion alert!

The Other Journal is an online journal that explores a whole range of issues related to the intersection of theology and culture. This month their focus is atheism, and they’ve been gracious enough to publish an article I wrote which attempts to summarize the main gist of my thesis. From now on whenever the inevitable “so what are you writing about?” question comes up, I can just refer them here…

If you’re interested, here’s the link.

Feb 22

3 Comments

“Belief” in God

One of the things I find interesting, whether in the course of my thesis research or just ordinary conversations, is the matter of what inclines people to belief or unbelief in God. How is that person A, when presented with the raw data of the natural world, will incline toward atheism while person B will look at the identical data and choose belief? Is faith simply an arbitrary “gift” given by God to some and withheld from others? Or, as fundamentalists on either side of the atheism/theism divide would have us believe, is belief/unbelief simply a matter of who is intelligent (or spiritually perceptive) enough to see the “obvious” truth? All of us, as twenty-first century “modern” people, live in what Charles Taylor has called “the immanent frame”—a set of social, technological, scientific, and political structures which can be understood on its own terms without reference to the supernatural. Why do some choose to see this frame as “open” to the possibility of the transcendent while others see it as “closed?” Read more

Jan 31

11 Comments

My Thesis in a Nutshell

I suspect that anyone who has ever written a thesis, a dissertation, or done any other kind of sustained writing on a particular subject may, at times, come to dread the inevitable question presented when someone learns of the nature of your task: “So what are you writing about?” Typically, when I am asked this question, I will begin to scratch my head and, if I can’t manage to change the subject, mumble something to the effect of, “well I’m trying to interpret the rise of the new atheism through the lens of theodicy.” Read more

Jan 12

14 Comments

Morality: Divine Spark or Evolutionary Trick?

A good deal of my reading this week has been on human moral intuitions and the role they are playing in the jeremiads against God and religion served up by the “new atheists.” I’ve read enough over the years to be roughly familiar with the typical evolutionary story told about the origins of morality: morality has evolved because it enhanced our evolutionary fitness. Whether the story told is one of group selection, preserving social cohesion, or reciprocal altruism, at the end of the day, the scientists tell us, we are moral creatures because this is the best way to get our genes into the next generation. Read more

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