The A-Unicornist

I'm a big advocate of theological non-cognitivism , sometimes known as ignosticism . It's the view that we don't really need to take theism all that seriously because the very concept of a god is ambiguously defined in the first place. Sometimes the problem cuts to the very meaning of works used to describe a god, like "mind", "cause", or even "exist"; that is, we have clear conceptualizations of these terms derived a posteriori, from our empirical experience. There are certain constraints on the coherency of these concepts, and it's often unclear what the terms mean when applied to a deity that is not composed of parts, does not exist within space and time, and possesses only agency — not other parts of the mind consistent with our empirical experience, like a cognitive subconscious and neural structure. The problem with an ill-defined concept is that those arguing against it are constantly shooting at a moving target. Sean Carroll point

My life is very full these days. My wife and I don't have kids yet (until we do, we call our dogs our 'kids'), but she's working more-than-full-time, and I'm essentially working two jobs — one as a personal trainer, and the day-to-day responsibilities of operating our gym as well as managing marketing, media, and social networking. Which means that I don't have much time to blog these days, and sometimes when I do  have the time I find myself with a brainstorming overload. I've never had as many unfinished drafts as I do now! This week my wife's been out of town, and I decided a couple of weeks ago to 'retire' from personal training on weekends. So this weekend has been a much-need indulgence in pure, unadulterated laziness. I've been playing the new Deus Ex  and Civilization  games, and stretching my legs with a little house cleaning so my wife doesn't return home to a full-on bachelor pad. This morning I was thinking about the types

This is long and wordy, but I think it's fantastic. I especially love the observation that "you can't say that god's nature includes love — because it is better than hate — without already having a concept of moral value that is external  to god's nature", as well as, "there is no logically necessary reason for god to have one set of properties over another in all possible worlds".

I've often found myself perplexed at how, in my nearly ten years of blogging (starting with The Apostasy , which became this blog in '09), Christians are chomping at the bit to engage in esoteric semantic dissections of philosophical arguments, and yet when I challenge the basic logical coherency of fundamental Christian doctrines... crickets. I can write a post about the Kalam Cosmological Argument and wrack up nearly 100 comments. I write a post saying that Christian doctrine is absurd , and I get nine comments — all from people who agree with me. A similar but less polemical post garnered nothing but an echo chamber . I could spend the afternoon digging through Disqus and my blog archive to find more examples, but this is a regular pattern. Christian keyboard warriors have (apparently) spent a lot of time reading the esoteric apologetic philosophies of William Lane Craig or Ed Feser, but they seem either unprepared or unwilling to offer a similarly rigorous defense of the