New to The A-Unicornist?

New to The A-Unicornist? Here are some posts I think you should read to get an idea of where I'm coming from on a variety of topics. Please be so kind as to peruse and, even better, using the search bar on the right side of the page before emailing me or necro-bumping an old topic. Chances are, there has already been vigorous discussion on this blog about the topic you're interested in:

An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar by Justin Schieber and Randal Rauser—the complete review:
http://www.theaunicornist.com/2016/12/an-atheist-and-christian-walk-into.html


Atheism: 

 Does atheism assume materialism to be true?

The importance of evidence

A slow crawl toward ontological naturalism

Science, faith, and deconversion

Why are there so many religions?

The Problem of Suffering

The folly of prayer

A world without God

Faith and Reason

Happy atheists: a thorn for believers

 

Philosophical arguments for God's existence:

The Kalam Cosmological Argument: the complete rebuttal

Earth: the privileged planet, and the lottery fallacy

The ontological argument

Was the universe designed for life?

The burden of proof

Why doesn't God's existence require an explanation?

 

Science:

Knowing What We Know, part 1: "Patterns"

How to spot a pseudoscience

Is there such a thing as "scientific fundamentalism"?

Science denial

Are science and faith in conflict? (Yes.)

The Trolley Problem and Objective Morality

 

Morality:

Objective morality does not exist (and nobody believes in it anyway)


Morality is subjective


The essence of moral reasoning, part 1: why "evil" fails


The essence of moral reasoning, part 2: making moral decisions


The essence of moral reasoning, part 3: informed decisions


Meaning and Purpose:

Facing the truth

Does the universe have a purpose?

If there's no God, what difference does anything make?



Christianity and the Bible:

The Case for Christ: The Movie: The Critique – Part 1

The Craig-Ehrman resurrection debate

The Bible is a worthless historical document

Hellfighters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Popular posts from this blog

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 1: The Bible is stupid

Imagine that you were the perfect, omnipotent, all-knowing Lord and Creator of the universe. You decided that you were going to give one -- just one -- book to humanity. It would be their moral compass, an insight into their nature and into yours, and act as a guide for how they could live rightly and walk a path that would lead their souls into an eternity with you. Obviously, the first thing you'd want to put in there are some totally unscientific, archaic behavioral codes for menstruating women, and for pregnant women after they give birth. You'd want to be sure to help them regulate slavery, and specify how badly they were allowed to beat their slaves. And of course you'd want the book to be chock full of mythology -- a creation myth, a flood myth, a fictional exodus, and hagiographical stories about how your loyal armies killed the shit out of everyone who dared to worship the wrong gods. There's a point here about the Bible that, in my estimation, really canno
Read more...

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 2: The Bible isn't true

In part 1, I pointed out the absurdity of believing that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God. That leads to closely related, but no less important point: most of what is in the Bible is simply not true . And in some cases, that actually impacts Christian theology rather profoundly. Adam and Eve did not exist. Overwhelming evidence from every field of biology points to humans evolving from a population of no fewer than 10,000 individuals. Any way you slice it, it's simply impossible that we can from one man and one woman. That's not an innocuous detail, either: the entirety of Christian theology is built upon Adam and Eve being real people. I'm fond of this quote from Pastor Tim Keller: “[Paul] most definitely wanted to teach us that Adam and Eve were real historical figures. When you refuse to take a biblical author literally when he clearly wants you to do so, you have moved away from the traditional understanding of the biblical authority.  If Adam d
Read more...

There is no such thing as sophisticated theology

Image
I often roll my eyes when atheists indulge "sophisticated" theological arguments. There's a belief among some atheists that Dawkins and other "new atheists" didn't engage with religious philosophy seriously enough, and that there needs to be a newer, better dressed atheism that indulges in the purportedly more nuanced and complex arguments for theism.   The problem is that without exception, every "sophisticated" argument for theism I've ever seen is couched in the same bad assumptions as the less-sophisticated ones. There is no such thing as a sophisticated philosophical argument that is based on (to name a few) Aristotelian metaphysics, substance dualism, unembodied minds, or transcendent causation. All of these concepts are absurd and false.   It's not that I don't think we should talk to theists at all; absolutely we should. But we should be very careful about the framing of the questions and be quick to identify spurious assumption
Read more...