GCU Dancer on the Midway
Paul Wright's blog
Recent Entries 
Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism -- Pitts 59 (4): 675 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
Paper on whether the Big Bang supports theistic arguments for creation ex nihilo, and particularly the Kalam argument. Notably, the author points out that if the singularity in the past requires a Creator, surely singularities in the future (such as black holes) require a Destroyer.
(tags: science religion creationism kalam bigbang big-bang Singularity philosophy)
August and Everything After (San Francisco, 2004)
Adam Duritz singing the Counting Crows song whose lyrics are on the album cover of August and Everything After (but which doesn't appear on the album itself). There are a couple of live versions of this: this one's better because the crowd aren't yelling through it.
(tags: counting-crows adam-duritz music)
Gastronomic Realism—A Cautionary Tale
Loeb's charming paper comparing Moral Realism and Gastronomic Realism (the idea that some foods are simply better than others, independent of individual tastes).
(tags: philosophy morality food realism gastronomic don-loeb system:filetype:pdf system:media:document)
“The Collapse Of Intelligent Design”
Ken Miller demonstrating why ID is not backed by evidence. Miller's a Catholic, not a neo-sceptical atheist neo-rationalist.
(tags: ken-miller intelligent-design id evolution creationism science biology dna)
Don Loeb – Moral Irrealism
Philosopher Don Loeb in conversation about moral irrealism, the view that there are no moral facts independent of our beliefs about them. Touches on whether introducing a God would help moral realism: Loeb thinks not.
(tags: philosophy morality atheism don-loeb)
Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis
"any time anyone's said anything comprehensible about the Trinity the Church has declared it a heresy." - Gareth
(tags: funny video religion christianity trinity mr-deity)
The Non-Expert: IKEA by Matthew Baldwin
A walkthrough of the various levels of the IKEA game: "As you continue through the main SHOWROOM you will see groups blocking the walkways while chatting and others moving against traffic. These people should be killed immediately."
(tags: funny humour culture parody games ikea furniture shopping)
David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs - opinion - 04 November 2009 - New Scientist
David Nutt's opinion piece in New Scientist.
(tags: drugs science badscience government law medicine politics david-nutt)
A life changed by evidence
Series of videos by a former evangelical Christian explaining why he became an atheist. Well produced and informative stuff. The chap makes a palpable effort to show how he was a Christian and how, for much of the time before his deconversion, he thought the things he was learning could be incorporated into Christianity rather than working against it.
(tags: video youtube de-conversion christianity evangelicalism bible morality)
Atheism, Reason, and Morality: Responding to Some Popular Christian Apologetics
D Gene Witmer on how best to response to Christian presuppositionalists. I ran into one of them online recently, which was fun.
(tags: religion presuppositionalism apologetics christianity philosophy rationality logic induction morality system:filetype:pdf system:media:document)
God is not the Creator, claims academic
In a sense, this isn't news: a lot of the religions that were contemporaries of Judaism had a creation story involving gods making order out of chaos rather than creating the universe from nothing, though I'd previously read that this was referred to in the Bible more obliquely than the this new theory suggests (e.g. water + Leviathan symbolises chaos in Psalm 74). If this idea catches on, it'll be interesting to see the new ideas the Abrahamic religions come up with to harmonise this with science :-)
(tags: religion bible history christianity creationism creation god chaos)
Plantinga: Religious Beilef as Properly Basic
A nice introduction to Plantinga's ideas. I've not read his books, so I don't know how accurately they're summarised, but it seems to fit with what I've read elsewhere.
(tags: belief philosophy plantinga epistemology christianity religion alvin-plantinga)
PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness
Peter Watts talks about a paper which claims consciousness arose out of the need to chose between conflicting motor impulses.
(tags: consciousness science scifi sci-fi peter-watts)
Demon ready to kill in city church
Magus Shadee (Wiz 5, Necromatic) apparently cast Summon Monster in the big Catholic church in Cambridge. Local clerics of Papem, god of guilt about sex, say they'll summon the City Watch, though it's not clear what they'd do about it. I'd've thought the clerics would be better off casting some defensive spells of their own.
(tags: woo-woo christianity cambridge occult paganism witchcraft)
What Is Evil For The Darwinist, Ctd
Andrew Sullivan posts some well-reasoned letters from readers on the question of what a non-theist would call "evil" (presumably responses to the old "how can you say God is evil when you don't have a basis for morality?" question). Bizarrely, he then describes them as showing "contempt" for religion. There's no pleasing some people. The letters are good, anyway.
seek and ye shall find…. but what?
“If you REALLY had been a Christian you would have never de-converted.” vs the observation that many de-converts are former Christian ministers.
(tags: de-conversion religion christianity)
Buddhism and the God-idea
Interesting. I liked: "Whether we call those superior beings gods, deities, devas or angels is of little importance, since it is improbable that they call themselves by any of those names."
(tags: buddhism god religion)
Why it's so hard to quantify false rape charges. - By Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore - Slate Magazine
False accusations probably account for 8 to 10% of all accusations, though the research isn't conclusive, and it's not clear how this compares to false reporting of other crimes. Interesting story about the falsely accused man who found support from his girlfriend who had been raped some time ago: emotions were similar on both sides.
(tags: feminism research rape crime)
Justice with Michael Sandel - Home
Harvard has put Michael Sandel's justly popular "Justice" course on the web. Well worth watching.
(tags: education philosophy morality ethics video community politics harvard justice)
Messy Revelation: Why Paul would have flunked hermaneutics
Susan Wise Bauer in Christianity Today, writing about Peter Enns, who noticed that the NT authors don't interpret the OT the way evangelicals would. I liked this bit: "This is the exactly the kind of exegesis that terrifies most evangelicals. The man who admits that meanings can be "read into" Scripture stands on the fabled slippery slope, right above a sheer drop-off, while below him churns a sea of relativism, upon which floats only a single overloaded lifeboat, captained by a radical feminist gay & lesbian & transgender activist who is very anxious to make the final decision about who gets pitched overboard."
(tags: bible hermaneutics peter-enns christianity religion paul old-testament)
What’s so great about being an ex-Christian? Intellectual integrity.
This sounds familiar.
(tags: ex-christian de-conversion atheism christianity religion)
Omnipresent G-d (LORD_YHWH) on Twitter
God's on Twitter, with some new commandments. I don't know why these atheists complain about divine hiddeness. "My word is a knife made white by heat, such as that which one uses to cut pastrami." - wisdom for us all there.
(tags: god yhwh religion funny satire christianity judaism twitter)
Science, Pseudoscience and Bollocks
An interesting essay which talks about the demarcation problem in science and argues that we should be against creation science because it's wrong, not try to argue about what science is. I'm shocked he referred to a Christian belief as "bollocks". I got told off for that once.
(tags: bollocks science pseudoscience epistemology empiricism logical-positivism karl-popper popper creationism dover)
Thunderbirds will grow a generation of mad engineers
FAB, Mr Ellis.
(tags: warren-ellis thunderbirds tv)
On The Possible God Of Philosophy And Cosmology Vs. The Personal, Historical God Of Faith
Camels With Hammers links to Dennett's remarks on hearing William Lane Craig's cosmological argument, and then talks about the gap between the source of the universe (which we should properly be agnostic about) and the gods of major religions.
(tags: daniel-dennett dennett william-lane-craig craig cosmology kalam philosophy physics)
Rock-Bottom Loser Entertaining Offers From Several Religions | The Onion - America's Finest News Source
Cruel but funny
(tags: onion religion funny satire humour)
"A Different Way of Knowing": The Uses of Irrationality... and its Limitations
Greta Christina talks about "other ways of knowing" and their uses, as applied to the theism/atheism debate.
(tags: religion epistemology science atheism greta-christina empiricism)
Understanding Sarah Palin: Or, God Is In The Wattles
Peter Watts gives his grand theory for why religion hasn't died out. It's all about preventing free-loading once societies get above a certain size.
(tags: peter-watts religion evolution sarah-palin politics psychology signalling)
Whence Rationality?
Some responses to the evolutionary argument against naturalism. The point that evolution is unlikely to come up with the sort of elaborate errors Plantinga mentions is new to me.
18th Dec 2007, 01:14 am - The Silent Partners
The Observer reveals that Creationists plan British theme park. This was picked up by Pharyngula, the Dawkins site, and some of the other usual suspects in atheist blog-land. Prophecies of doom were uttered, comparisons made to the creationist nutters in the USA, and so on.

Nonsense like this makes you despair at the state of investigative journalism in this country. The AH Trust seems to be a project of the Zebra agency, a TV production company. I say that partly because they both have similarly illiterate websites filled with nasty javascript menus, but mostly because the same address is used in both domain registrations (that of a location which looks, from Google's aerial shots, like a private house near Wigan). The Charity Commission's registration documents for the Trust tell us that AH stands for "Assembly Hall" and that they originally had a site at christianassembly.co.uk, which now appears to be defunct.

The Trust's annual report makes interesting reading for many reasons. The Trust reports that their income from donations was about £300 last year, and that they had £311 in the bank at the end of September 2007. (It's possible, looking at the graph on page 7, that we're meant to multiply these figures by 1000, but you'd have hoped they'd indicate that in the report somewhere).

The Observer tells us the Trust is talking to "a number of rich backers", who I can exclusively reveal are called Mr Desk, Mr Chair, Mr Pen and Mr Stapler (Offler bless you, PTerry, stay well as long as you can), as well as a pair of investors to whom I am intimately connected.

For heaven's sake, lefty journos, leave Christianity in this country to die in peace, with a bit of dignity, instead of writing yet another scare story about how we're about to be over-run.
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