Patheos is a website that hosts a bunch of different blogs that all talk about faith. Sometimes, all the blogs have a shared question to answer. For March / April, it’s “We invite all of our contributors to respond to the challenge by contributing with a response on why they are committed to their faith group in 200 words or less.” I’m obviously not on Patheos, but I thought it would be fun to answer this question and really try to aim for brevity with the 200 words or less part. Obviously, this paragraph doesn’t count. Here I go:

I’m an atheist because I don’t believe in any gods. What would you say if someone asked you if you believed in Sasquatch? Well, there’s simply not enough evidence for it! Same with God, except more so… Now imagine if millions claimed they saw Sasquatch in their dreams, but some say he was yellow and tall, others said he was blue and small, and some even said he was invisible! Some people ask the Sasquatch to do things for them, but things only work out in their favor at about the same rate as chance! You hear that the Sasquatch wants to help everyone and have everyone enjoy his company, but of course, Sasquatch has never come to visit you! He never shows up in any physical way at all! And he certainly isn’t helping babies born with birth defects or people caught in fires, no matter how hard they wish Sasquatch would help him! You hear that Sasquatch wants only love, but then read a story about Sasquatch forcing people to eat their own children if you work on Sunday too much. Perhaps that’s not quite fair, but that’s what claims about gods sound like to me.

You can see other answers from Daylight Atheism, Friendly Atheist, Uncredible Hallq, and Unreasonable Faith.

Follow up to: The Euthyphro Dilemma and Why Moral Realism is False and How We Can Still Have Moral Discourse Without It

After writing “The Euthyphro Dilemma” and “Why The Moral Argument Fails”, I was interested in a potential argument against the existence of God (an argument that claims to demonstrate God’s nonexistence):

P1: If God exists, moral realism is true (there is only one morality, it is true, and it is irrational to not follow it).
P2: Moral realism is false.
C3: Therefore, God does not exist.

I’ve defended P2 throughout my series on normativity, with the most recent summary in “Why Moral Realism is False and How We Can Still Have Moral Discourse Without It”.

Of course, for P2, it’s important to separate arguments against moral realism in the actual world from moral realism as a concept. After all, perhaps moral realism is false, but could have been true had something else been the case, say… a God existed. However, I in “We Ought Not Have an Ought Simpliciter” and explicitly in “The Euthyphro Dilemma” have been arguing against moral realism as a concept and with God, which makes P2 relevant.

P1 I’m less sure of… I’m not even sure I buy it myself and “The Euthyphro Dilemma” seems to argue against P1, not for P1. But I think P1 is popular among theists (at least Abrahamic ones), which thus makes the actual nature of morality pretty jarring. As I said, “the real nature of morality doesn’t comport well with what we would expect on Christianity or many other religions, further straining the case for theism.”

But if you’re inclined to accept P1 and then buy my argument for P2, C3 follows logically. Any thoughts? Ways to make this argument stronger or weaker? Defeat it all together?

Recently, I’ve been devoting the Weekly Link Roundups to rebut common theistic arguments. Since many excellent rebuttals already exist and I don’t want to re-invent the wheel, I thought gathering these rebuttals all in one place would be great. It’s mostly for my personal benefit, but perhaps yours too.

This one will target the Fine-Tuning Argument, which argues that because certain cosmological constants could have been off by a little bit and rendered the universe uninhabitable, only a God could have created the “just right” universe we live in. It typically flows as follows:

P1: The universe is finely-tuned for life.
P2: if the universe is finely-tuned, the fine-tuning could only occur by necessity, chance, or design.
P3: The fine-tuning did not occur by necessity or chance.
C4: Therefore the universe is designed.
P5: Only God can design the universe.
C6: Therefore God exists.

Here are the links:

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Follow up to: Why The Moral Argument Fails

In “Why The Moral Argument Fails”, I outlined the Moral Argument for God’s existence, as follows…

P1: If God does not exist, objective moral duties do not exist.
P2: Objective moral duties do exist.
C3: Therefore, God exists.

…and demonstrated it fails because P2 was false. Objective moral duties do not exist in the sense of having a single, absolute set of moral commands. Now, I want to look at P1. As I said earlier, showing that P1 is false is merely lapping the theist who already lost the moral argument at the failure of P2, but should be pretty instructive in considering theistic morality and how normativity works out in general.

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I’ve been running a three-part Weekly Link Roundup series looking at the cosmological argument and the design argument, with a forthcoming one looking at the fine-tuning argument. However, there’s another argument for the existence of God that gets brought up a lot — the moral argument.

The moral argument tends to flow like this:

P1: If God does not exist, objective moral duties do not exist.
P2: Objective moral duties do exist.
C3: Therefore, God exists.

Here, I think I have original (and moderately concise) commentary to make, so I thought it would be worth writing my own essay about it.

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