The A-Unicornist

2016 saw lots of fantastic game releases—Doom, Inside, Far Cry Primal, X-Com 2,Civilization VI, and tons more. Of course, I'm not a professional game reviewer (although, incidentally, I did write for the webzine GameCritics.com for nearly ten years); I just like to game when I have the time. Accordingly, I'm sure some great games have come out that I missed. I did play quite a few great games this year, however, but when it comes to my pick for best of the year, as the great warriors of Highlander declared, "There can be only one."

But first, of course, the biggest disappointment, and the honorable mention.

Biggest disappointment: X-Com 2
I absolutely loved the first X-Com. It was challenging, deep, well-balanced, and incredibly addicting. It could be maddeningly frustrating at times, but only because it was so relentlessly engaging. X-Com 2 made a number of significant changes to the game, and I thoroughly enjoyed all of them. On paper, it was a brilliant evolution …

Randal Rauser just wrote a post imploring people to refrain from mocking others' beliefs—because, in his view, beliefs are "an extension of the person"; mocking a person's beliefs, he claims, is mocking the person.

I wrote a response in the comments section essentially suggesting that some beliefs are more deserving of mockery than irenic engagement (anti-vax, young-earth creationism, homeopathy, Holocaust denial, etc.), and that it's not anyone's job to treat any given beliefs with deference by default; rather, it's the job of those who believe to show that their beliefs are worthy of respect by engaging in rational discourse.

After reflecting on my comment though, I think I could take an even stronger stance: the very idea that beliefs need to be respected is fundamentally misguided. It's true that beliefs are, as Randal says, an "extension" of the person—their experiences, biases, values, etc.—but beliefs need not define a person. Moreove…

A friend of mine recently reported some terrible news: a friend of hers had been in a devastating house fire, suffering severe burns. The woman's son, just two years old, fared much worse—suffering second and third degree burns on over 90% of his body. They were both flown to a burn treatment center in Galveston. Last update I heard on the child: "They'll be able to save his eyelids."

I used to think that losing a child would be the worst thing a parent could go through. It's not. This is. I tried to imagine the absolute hysteria the mother must have felt in learning that her child was on the brink of death in what is perhaps the most painful ordeal a human can experience. If he survives, he could be facing amputations, years of surgeries and rehabilitation, and terrible pain. At two years old. A time for both mother and child that should be filled with joy and wonder and stories about small frustrations that become amusing in hindsight.

It's an absolutely he…

I had a lengthy and spirited discussion today with Randal Rauser over on his blog about a story he told regarding an acquaintance of his named Bill Muller. You can read the full story on Randal's blog (as well as read my discussion with him in the comments) but I'll summarize it here:

Bill was on his way to Cameroon in West Africa with a choir group, carrying items that had been requested by local missionaries. He was concerned about being caught up in customs and having to pay duty fees for the items. When things began to look grim after an inspector requested to see receipts for all the items (which Bill didn't have), a young agent arrived on the scene who, in a remarkable coincidence, turned out to be the son of a family Bill had stayed with in Cameroon many years ago. The young agent then allowed Bill to pass through customs swiftly. Bill went on to attribute this to divine intervention. As Randal says in introduction of the post, he doesn't take this to be a mirac…

Over the next few posts, I'd like to revisit some small parts of "An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar" that were tangential to the central topics but nonetheless inspired me to reflect on them. 

For this post, I'd like to examine the refrain that God has morally sufficient reasons for doing... well, lots of things that seem to run counter to the idea of the universe being created, with humans in mind, by a benevolent deity—the indifference of nature to suffering, the hostility of the universe, etc.

Incidentally, this post was partly inspired by the following tweet exchange between the authors of that aforementioned book (click to enlargify):

Schieber is arguing that God is responsible for the suffering in the world, because he could have made a sinless world with free will—like we're presumably being promised in Heaven—but chose not to. Rauser's response is that the atheist has to show that God does not have morally sufficient reasons for going about th…

Don't want to wade through the series post by post? You can download my complete review of Randal Rauser and Justin Schieber's collaborative effort here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3wty0gogjgeukxl/AnAtheistandaChristianWalkintoaBar...thecompletereview%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0

Or on Google Drive here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SSDzFnIGIkJX1ytL4tastytwQsaBdNPMdpbWHM_UzR0/edit?usp=sharing

Rauser and Schieber wrap up the book with a chapter on biological evolution and the integral role that suffering and death play in the cycle of life. Schieber argues that the fact of evolution should be surprising on theism (since God could have instantaneously brought complex life into existence), and that the ubiquity of suffering inherent to the evolutionary process poses a strong challenge to the theist concept of a maximally good creator. Why would a benevolent creator employ such a callous process?
First, a very minor nitpick with Schieber: he defines evolution as being unguided, implicitly (but not explicitly) to accommodate those who believe in the pseudoscience of intelligent design. But I've never liked the language of "unguided"; evolution is guided by survival and reproduction—the non-random selection of randomly varying genes.

Alternatives to evolution?
Rauser objects to Schieber's assertion that if atheism were true, evolution would pretty much have to…

Do mathematics reveal a designer?
Rauser takes aim at atheism in this next section of the book by positing that the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics is evidence that a rational mind is behind the design of the universe. This is a favorite topic of mine (as I'm a big fan of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and his book Where Mathematics Comes From, which posits a wholly physical and cognitive origin of mathematics), and Rauser stumbles out of the gate with his very first erroneous example—one that to my surprise, Schieber does not object to. 
That example is the famed Fibonacci number sequence. The contention is that this number is readily observable, as Rauser claims, "throughout nature, ranging from the spiral structure of seashells and pinecones to pinwheel galaxies". He then makes a similar claim about the numbers pi and phi (closely related to the Fibonacci sequence), claiming that examples of them are abundant in nature.The problem is, this is …