My Philosophy/Nontheism Blog

• Why Should Anybody Care What Other People Believe?
• Why I Don't Believe in God...and Why You Shouldn't, Either: The Short, Simple Version
• "Isn't it Silly to Compare God to Santa Claus?"
• What Can Be Known
  • Belief and Justification
  • Knowledge by Acquaintance vs. Propositional Knowledge
  • Subjective, Intersubjective, and Objective
  • Basic Metaphysical and Epistemic Assumptions
  • Skepticism, Philosophical Skepticism, Solipsism, and Empiricism
  • We Are All Scientists
  • The Compatibility of Metaphysical Beliefs with What We Know

• Arguments for the Existence of God and Why They Fail:
  • Cosmological Arguments for the Existence of God
  • Arguments from Design
  • Ontological Arguments for the Existence of God
    • St. Anselm's Ontological Argument in a Nutshell ("The argument fails to distinguish between an object or entity and the mental conception of an object or entity.")
    • Modal Ontological Arguments in General
    • Alvin Plantinga's "Victorious" Argument
    • Kurt Godel's Ontological Argument
  • Pascal's Wager
  • Belief in God Makes People More Moral
  • "I See Evidence of God's Work All Around Me"
  • The Bible (Koran, Book of Mormon, Choose a Holy Book) is the Word of God
  • "Einstein Believed in God!" (well, no, he didn't: “The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.”--Albert Einstein in a letter to Beatrice Frohlich, December 17, 1952; Einstein Archive 59-797; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 217. For more Einstein quotes, see here.)
  • "Hitler Was an Atheist!" (well, no, he wasn't: "We were convinced that the people need and require this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out."--Adolf Hitler, Speech in Berlin, October 24, 1933. For more Hitler quotes, see here or here.)

• Biblical Problems and Contradictions:
  • Points I Find Strange
    
  • Outright Contradictions
    
• Respect for Believers vs. Respect for Beliefs ("I hope that it is clear that we can respect believers as persons, simply because they are aware, self-aware, thinking, feeling, experiencing entities, while failing to respect unmeritorious beliefs, and that we can disparage beliefs without disparaging persons. We respect sincerity, genuineness, and the search for truth; but respecting persons does not mean that we must also respect beliefs we find absurd.")
• Values
  
• The Meaning of Life
  
• Descriptions: Holism and Nonholism ("I might see the spiderweb as a whole, but I also see its internal structure; and I see both features of the spiderweb, its unbroken wholeness and its internal structure, simultaneously.")
• Brains, Minds, and the Afterlife ("There is a clear correlation between mental states and brain states; between mental function and brain function. And this fact gives a prima facie reason to think there is no afterlife, although not an absolutely conclusive reason. After all, if mental function and brain function are correlated, then when brain function ceases, so, one would expect, will mental function.")
• Miracles That Didn't Happen
  

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