In his book, The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins makes a powerful case for evolution, while debunking the all too common misconceptions regarding the role of “chance” in evolution. Dawkins shows that evolution is a fundamentally non-random process. Chance is important in that it provides a kind of “fuel” to this process, but it is the…
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An Introduction to the Evolution versus Creation Debate
The evolution / creation debate hinges largely on a disagreement regarding the nature of science and scientific theories. Before getting into that, however, it will be important to address the common misconception that evolution and atheism are somehow two sides of the same coin. After that we will define the critical terms in this debate…
Understanding Reason and Faith
The debate between faith and reason is in many ways the decisive battleground in the debate between theism and atheism. This is because most defenses of theism appeal to the inadequacy of reason. Typically these defenses will take the form of claiming that there are appropriate spheres for reason, and appropriate spheres for faith, and…
Bible Accuracy
The question of Bible accuracy is important in many debates, particularly those regarding creationism and certain defenses of Christianity. Creationism is, in fact, an attempt to make science compatible with the fundamentalist requirement of Biblical literalism and infallibility. Christian theism typically defends its claim to truth by appealing to supposedly fulfilled Bible prophesies. Before tackling…
Atheism, Agnosticism, and Burden of Proof
“How can you be an atheist if you cannot disprove the existence of God?” This all-too-common question is often related to a misunderstanding of the concept of burden of proof, of how that concept relates to belief, and of how both of these ideas relate to the definitions of agnosticism and atheism. Burden of Proof…
The Bible: A Manual for Living?
Christians often take great pride in their ability to cite Biblical verse on a wide range of issues, and this is certainly understandable since they believe that the Bible is the Word of God. Fundamentalists, in fact, see it as the inerrant word of God—a book that says what it means, and means what it…
Bible Errors and Contradictions
Bible debates, perhaps more than any other debate topic, can become lost in endless details of interpretation and subtle questions of translation. It can easily seem that to get into the debate at all requires one to be a Biblical scholar. Fortunately, this is not the case, particularly when dealing with fundamentalists who claim that…
A Darwinian Approach to Metaethics
In our other article, Does Morality Depend on God?, we critiqued God-dependent metaethics. Nothing had been said of the merits of any particular non-theistic metaethical theory, and nothing needs to be said to make that critique stand. After all, God-dependent metaethics doesn’t somehow become true by default. However, much more can be said for a…
Does Morality Depend on God?
Introduction I have rarely engaged in a debate with a theist where the issue of morality justification has not come up. The theist’s complaint typically takes the following form. If there is no God, then why is it wrong to murder and steal? Even if you don’t want to murder and steal, on what grounds…
Evolution: Converging Lines of Evidence
The strength of any theory comes not from a single measurement or a single confirmed prediction, but from the theory’s many predictions being confirmed by many independent tests, samples, and methods. Often, attacks on evolutionary theory take the form of showing that some measurement technique is not infallible, or that some measurement technique depends on…
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