The Warfare Is Mental

Welcome to TWIM 4!

February 10, 2012

Happy belated New Year! I don’t know about you, but I sure had a nice rest. Once I noticed that people were finding the new TWIM (presumably through Google searches), I had to step into high gear and get back in action. My apologies if the blog has seemed “dead” for a while. I assure you I’m now fully up and running and will now be responding to comments and posting in my usual manner.

If you were a regular at the old TWIM, you might have noticed that I’ve given it yet another facelift. Although, this time it’s actually more than a facelift. We went from a WordPress-hosted, generic, rigid, ugly, hardly-customizable theme to a self-hosted hand-crafted theme! The “stock” WordPress blog definitely had it’s pluses and minuses, but in the final analysis there weren’t any existing themes that had the look or features I wanted. So I wrote my own. That’s the cool thing about WordPress: a basic coding / graphic design skill set allows you one to do almost anything. It’s definitely a little Beta, but at least now I can do pretty much whatever I want with this blog (technically speaking). Please have a look around and let me know if you come across anything that looks or works funky. Are any areas hard to read? Any broken links? Any weird paragraph formatting? Page(s) not displaying correctly in some browser or device? Leave a comment describing whatever it is, and also your system, device and/or browser if you don’t mind. So far the theme seems to work well in the major browsers and on iPhones.

So what else is new?

DBT01: Peter Hurford vs. cl On Needless Suffering

February 4, 2012

Our first debate of the year is officially scheduled as follows:

Opening Statement by Peter Hurford (2000 words), due February 15th.
My rebuttal (1500 words), due February 19th.
Peter’s rejoinder (1500 words), due February 23rd.
My second rebuttal (1500 words), due February 27th.
Peter’s closing statement (1000 words), due March 2nd.
My closing statement (500 words), due March 8th.

As explained on the debates page, Peter will argue that needless suffering exists, ergo belief in the traditional Abrahamic God is not justified (NOTE: in our email chain, Peter and I agreed—for whatever reason at that time—that we would not be debating the “ergo” part). The judges for this debate are Daniel Vecchio (Theist), Andrés Ruiz (Agnostic), and Matt DeStefano (Atheist).

Open Thread From Common Sense Atheism

This post is just a placeholder to continue this discussion from the now-defunct Common Sense Atheism blog, should any of the participants or onlookers be interested.

Anatomy Of A Failed Atheist Argument

January 21, 2012

This post was formerly titled, “Oh, There’s A Contradiction Alright!” but I changed it in honor of Angra Mainyu because it is such a shining example of the sophistry and willful ignorance so prevalent on the atheist side of contemporary philosophy of religion. Should Angra Mainyu have the wherewithall to return and play fair, and actually demonstrate that which he asserts, I’ll gladly change the title to, “cl Didn’t Get It.” You’ll see, the comment thread says it all.

Of Angra Mainyu’s blog, a commenter recently remarked,

An interesting blog with some good arguments, among others what appears to be a thorough refutation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

I thought to myself, “That sounds interesting, maybe I’ll go have a look.” Needless to say, a thorough refutation is not what I found. Thorough, yes, but a refutation… not as much so.

We Cannot Answer The Ultimate Moral Question(s)

December 31, 2011

Naturalists and atheists generally regard empirical truth as a virtue, sometimes even the prime virtue. My ears perk whenever I hear them preach any form of moral realism, as always I’m curious to hear how they can ground what they say (I’d be a moral “error-theorist” if I were an atheist). In discussions of morality these days, many naturalists and atheists seem to grasp desperately for something like a complete morality, but I don’t think we can answer the ultimate moral question(s).
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Two Blogs You Might Like

December 4, 2011

Every once in a while I do a blog shout-out. Last time, it was Andrés Ruiz. This time—since i’ve been absent for a while—I’ll do two: Unshielded Colliders (Jonathan Livengood) and Disputed Issues (Stephen R. Diamond). I discovered both through their comments at CSA. I like Diamond’s exploration of semantics and the way our language shapes our beliefs, and I like Livengood’s general “hold on let’s take a cold hard look at this” approach to making sense of data. Great stuff, both are now in my links.

Where Is Credit Due?

October 12, 2011

Those familiar with (a)theist discussion might have come across some variation of the statement,

If believers want to give God credit for changes in their life, if they are going to maintain any semblance of consistency, they must also ascribe the horrible atrocities around the world to God’s hand as well.

I still can’t figure out where the logic is. The statement seems wedded to the mistaken assumption that God is the only one with a hand in reality. Why should we ascribe the holocaust to God’s hand? “Because God could’ve stopped it and didn’t,” is the likely atheist response.

Upon Insufficient Evidence

October 1, 2011

Atheists and others prone to scientism often endorse an ethics of belief that is roughly the view articulated by W.K. Clifford in his famous essay, The Ethics of Belief:

…it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Clifford clearly seems to be making a normative claim. Do you agree or disagree? How about the converse of Clifford’s statement? Would you say it is right always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon sufficient evidence? Why or why not?

Study Suggests Atheists Suppress The Truth

September 28, 2011

There’s been a lot of hubbub over this “Atheists and Asperger’s” study that recently surfaced at the Scientific American blog. For me, this was the interesting line:

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

The Illogic of Vox Day

In his post Killer Game, Vox Day, internet “superintelligence,” writes:

I don’t believe I could recommend this as a strategy for most men, but it surely educational to learn that raping and killing a woman is demonstrably more attractive to women than behaving like a gentleman. And women, before all the inevitable snowflaking commences, please note that there is absolutely nothing to argue about here. It is an established empirical fact.

Absolutely nothing to argue about? Is he for real?

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