Disambiguating Faith: Why Faith Is Unethical (Or “In Defense Of The Ethical Obligation To Always Proportion Belief To Evidence”)

A couple of weeks ago, I argued that there was a real distinction between “lacking a belief in any God or gods” on the one hand and “believing there is no God (or gods)” on the other hand.  Primarily I saw the heart of the distinction as resting with the difference between on the one [...]

Disambiguating Faith: How A Lack Of Belief In God May Differ From Various Kinds Of Beliefs That Gods Do Not Exist

Yesterday on Friendly Atheist there was a vigorous debate in the comments section about whether there is a real and important difference between claiming one lacks belief in God (or gods) and outright claiming that there is no God (or gods).  Here is a nice formulation of the argument that the distinction is an irrelevant [...]

Differently Abled Or Simply More Virtuous In One Respect

Earlier today, I made a post comparing the different routes which atheists and those with Asperger’s syndrome take to their naturalistic explanations of causes of events that more religiously inclined people tend to chalk up to supernatural agency.  Whereas religious people would attribute an illness or finding their true love to the purposeful forces, like God’s [...]

A Little Evidence That Atheists and Theists Don’t “Simply Think Differently”

In order to respond to certain misunderstandings based on this post’s original, provocative title (Do Atheists Just Have Asperger’s?) I have re-edited it and retitled it.  There is now a new opening paragraph and extra concluding paragraphs. It is often suggested that the difference between theists and atheists might simply stem from differences in their naturally given [...]

Evolution and Epistemology

If our minds take to be true only what evolution has conditioned us to think is true for the sake of fitness for survival, does this mean that our beliefs cannot be genuinely true but only some sort of useful ways of thinking that do not necessarily track how the world actually is?  And if [...]

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Last summer I wrote a number of posts through which I sought to disambiguate the various senses of the word faith and in the process distinguish the various virtuous ethical and epistemic practices for which faith is typically confused by means of ambiguous equivocations.  I attempted to distinguish the virtues of hope, loyalty, trust, intuitional [...]

Is Reason My God 4: On Reason As An Authority

Even though this post is “part 4″ of a reply to the same commentator, it can be understood without reading prior installments.  If you would like to catch up with prior installments nonetheless, here are parts 1, 2, and 3. In reply to this post, Grant writes: Appealing to the authority of reason is the [...]

Is Reason My “God” 2: On Authority, Uncertainty, and Inexplicability

I’ve been remiss lately in replying to interesting reader challenges.  A backlog is growing of remarks I intend to address.  So I decided, in order to get back in the swing of things to quickly reply to this new one I just got.  Grant writes, Seems there are people looking for an authority to believe [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith Is Neither Brainstorming, Hypothesizing, Nor Simply Reasoning Counter-Intuitively

In this third reply to Adam (you can read the first two here and here, but need not in order to follow this post), I will examine his following suggestions: When I asked if it is rational to cease rationality, what I meant was the following. Since it is only rational to explore all possible paths [...]

Disambiguating Faith: Faith As Guessing

On Facebook (where you can also be my friend if you’d like), Adam replies to the latest installment of the “Disambiguating Faith” series with this question: Hate to be corny, but in an episode of House M.D., every rational road runs out and a case is seemingly unsolvable. Finally, by eliminating a symptom (which is [...]

Rational Beliefs, Rational Actions, And When It Is Rational To Act On What You Don’t Think Is True

We hold beliefs with various degrees of justification and the demands of rationality dictate to us that we proportion our degree of belief to the degree of our justification.  If I am looking at evidence for two sides of a position and I find that 60% of the evidence seems to favor side A, whereas [...]

More Thoughts On Scientists In The Public Square

My previous post today on religious scientists was based on a comment I first made on the blog He Lives in reply to a post there.  Below is a subsequent comment from that blog from “Wandering Internet Commenter” interspersed with my replies to him. Normative arguments are fun and all, but it never hurt to [...]

For God or Morality? On Those Who’d Hold Morality Hostage For Faith

In his recent critique of Francis Collins, the Christian Evangelical and geneticist recently appointed by Obama to head the National Institutes of Health, Sam Harris referenced the slides from one of Collins’s speeches.  I want to take two posts (but possibly more if there are comments or if I otherwise have extra relevant ideas on [...]

Psychotic Reasoning, The Will To Believe, And Religious Interpretations Of The Mentally Ill

Yesterday morning, The Friendly Atheist’s Hemant Mehta analyzed stories of mothers who murdered their babies under religiously interpreted delusions with a critical eye towards the religions which put certain fantasies in their heads.  In reply to criticisms of his making this connection that came from skeptigirl (in this terrific post on psychosis you should read), [...]

The Epistemological and Metaphysical Case Against Obama’s Birth Certificate

Heretical Ideas just rocked my world: It might seem, to the average person, that the “Birthers” must have a tough time proving their case. After all, Barack Obama has released his Certification of Live Birth (pictured above), which meets all the requirements for proving one’s citizenship to the State Department. The authenticity of the certificate [...]

On The Alleged Intolerance Of The New Atheists Towards “Faitheists”

In reply to Daniel Dennett’s attack on “belief in belief”, Patrick Appel wrote the following: I consider myself an agnostic or pantheist depending upon how you define such labels but still have an acute nostalgia for my Catholic upbringing. I find the certainty of some atheists and most fundamentalists deeply grating. In reply, one of [...]