Consensus Argument When lots of people reach consensus on a topic, we should grant their judgment due consideration. That’s just common sense. Unfortunately, that commonsense dictum has a cancerous mutant form known as the consensus argument. One proponent of the…
Quranic Inerrancy
Muslims, to an even greater extent than Christians, fancy that their holy book is inerrant. Zakir Naik, a conservative Muslim scholar, declares that the Quran is never to be critiqued. He demands that non-Muslim houses of worship be forbidden…
The Morality of Science
I once heard a TV preacher—I believe it was Garner Ted Armstrong—chastise all scientists within broadcast radius, admonishing them that morality cannot be retrieved from a database. He cautioned that the rockets returning from the moon never brought home any…
Eternal Mind
Theologians postulate an Eternal Mind as the first cause. This eternal mind is offered as an alternative to the unpalatable idea of eternal matter (interpreted broadly to include everything studied by physics). Unfortunately, the presumption that an eternal mind is…
Street Epistemology Critique
I would like to say a few words about Street Epistemology[i], an approach to having conversations with believers. Street Epistemology is based on the notion that polite one-on-one dialog between atheists and believers is the most effective way to lead…
Christian eugenics
A conservative Christian blog repeated the malicious trope that atheistic Darwinism was to blame for the forced sterilizations of the feeble-minded performed from the 1920s until the 1980s. Sixty thousand citizens in 35 states were sterilized. In my native North Carolina,…