Discussions

Articles in the Discussions section.

• Does "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" Survive Its Own Test?
• Can "Only Science Gives Knowledge" Be Established Scientifically?
• Seven Theories of Knowledge, Each Judged by Its Own Standard
• Faith is not a valid route to truth, because it can be used to justify any proposition, including mutually exclusive ones
• When Is Absence of Evidence Evidence of Absence?
• Is Demanding Empirical Evidence of God a Category Mistake?
• Empirical, Logical, Testimonial: Which Kind of Evidence Fits Which Kind of Claim?
• Religious Belief and Wellbeing: What Correlation Can and Cannot Show
• The burden of proof lies with the theist, and absent positive evidence the rational default is non-belief
• Petitionary prayer produces no result beyond what chance and ordinary causes already predict, which is what we would expect if no one is listening
• Cumulative natural selection fully explains the apparent design of living things, so the design argument gives no reason to posit a designer
• Religious belief is overwhelmingly predicted by birthplace, not evidence, so no believer is entitled to the confidence they place in their own tradition
• The instinct to call on God under mortal terror is not evidence that God exists
• The Slide From Methodological to Philosophical Naturalism
• God of the Gaps, and Naturalism of the Gaps
• What Physics Has Not Settled, and What That Does and Does Not Show
• Religion is fully explained as a natural human phenomenon, so no God is needed to account for it — and documented borrowing from earlier cultures undercuts any claim of unique divine revelation
• No testimony can rationally establish a miracle, because it is always more probable that the witnesses are mistaken or lying than that a law of nature was suspended
• Causation is not a fundamental feature of reality, so cosmological arguments rest on a folk notion mature physics has discarded
• Abiogenesis: What Has Actually Been Demonstrated
• What Evolution Explains, and What It Does Not Claim To
• Does the Multiverse Answer Fine-Tuning?
• Genuinely novel properties emerge from matter, refuting the principle that a cause cannot give what it lacks
• God has always been an explanatory placeholder for what science had not yet explained, and that gap has only ever shrunk
• Why Consciousness Remains Hard for Materialism
• If Minds Evolved for Survival, Why Trust Them About Metaphysics?
• What Do Near-Death Experiences Establish?
• Has Materialism Collapsed?
• Can Moral Facts Be Objective Without a Grounding?
• Does the Problem of Evil Assume What It Denies?
• Grounding morality in God's commands makes right reduce to might, so theism does not secure objective morality and can sanctify atrocity
• A revealed text's science and morality track exactly what its human authors of that era would have known and believed, which is strong evidence of human rather than divine authorship
• Determinism and the Responsibility Naturalists Still Assert
• An omniscient God who infallibly knows the future is incompatible with human free will and just accountability
• Is Naturalism Really the Simpler Explanation?
• The Stone Paradox and What Omnipotence Means
• Do Contradictory Religions Cancel Each Other Out?
• Necessary Existence: From Ibn Sina to Contemporary Modal Arguments
• The universe (or the totality of contingent things) can be an unexplained brute fact, so cosmological and contingency arguments give no reason to posit God
• An actual infinite causal regress is metaphysically possible, so there is no need for an uncaused first cause
• The concept of God is too ill-defined or incoherent to name a real object, so 'God exists' asserts nothing that could be true
• Cosmological and contingency arguments commit the fallacy of composition
• Once every member of the series is explained, the whole series needs no further explanation
• The principle of sufficient reason collapses all contingency into necessity, so it should be rejected
• A perfectly self-sufficient God would have no reason or need to create, so the act of creation is either evidence of need or is arbitrary
• The vast quantity of apparently gratuitous suffering — especially of innocent children — is strong evidence against an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God
• Metaphysical dependence need not bottom out in an ultimate ground, so grounding-based contingency arguments fail
• We never observe necessary causal connection, so the causal premise of cosmological arguments is unwarranted
• De re necessity is unintelligible, so arguments turning on a 'necessary being' rest on a confused notion
• The RNA World: What It Explains and What It Leaves Open
• How Little Does a Living Cell Need? The Minimal Genome Experiments
• Irreducible Complexity and the Bacterial Flagellum
• Is DNA a Code, and What Would Follow If It Is?
• Mechanisms Beyond Natural Selection: The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
• Epigenetics: What Is Actually Inherited?
• What Makes Human Genomes Distinctive
• Probability Arguments About the Origin of Life
• Is Intelligent Design a Scientific Theory?
• The Anthropic Principle: Explanation or Observation Selection?
• Does a Universe With a Beginning Require a Cause?
• Does Randomness Produce Design?
• Randomness Cannot Design