This episode is about Intelligent Design – sort of. I don’t argue here for intelligent design. What I’m doing is looking at a couple of philosophical objections to ID which, I argue, are just contrived for no other purpose than to exclude intelligent design from “science.”
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Loading ...Recall that not all that long ago, I posted my review of a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alister McGrath. One of the points I made is as follows: Hitchens says that religion dissolves our duty to uphold the truth. Now as I said at the time, as a Christian the duty to uphold the truth makes perfect sense to me, and of course it’s a duty I take seriously. I raised the question, additionally, of why the truth about religion ought to matter to someone who is not a Christian but is an atheist. I noted the straw man attack on religious people as people who don’t care about truth, and then I said:
The second issue is perhaps the more interesting one, and it is one that, unfortunately, McGrath never picks up in his reply. What obligation, according to Hitchens, do we really have to “live and witness in truth?” What is the basis of this obligation? For example, if there were a peaceful religion that was false yet gave its members great happiness and hope until the day they die, is there anything wrong in believing in it, and is there any actual moral duty to persuade people to give it up? Hitchens certainly offers no clear reason for thinking that truth at all costs is a greater good than peace and happiness for the greatest number of people on earth
That seemed like a pretty clear point, right? Well, apparently not. here’s what a nameless “reluctant atheist” had to say:
[T]he debate is utterly superfluous, because whether or not religion is a “poison” or not, it has no bearing on any kind of claim religion has to truth: the debate is a red herring.
This is because – contrary to the claims (pdf) of Glenn Peoples – the truth does matter. Time and again, Peoples claims that it doesn’t matter what individuals believe in. But Dawkins is right to point out in the God Delusion that it insults us – indeed, degrades us – as human beings to believe in things merely for the purposes of comfort. We can do better than that.
Oh dear. it’s almost as though the author of those comments had set out to make the opposite point, given how obviously untrue his comments here are. Notice how many times he quotes me making this outlandish claim: Exactly zero times.
At the risk of boosting this person’s exposure, I’ve brought this up here, and I’ve also contacted the author of that blog and requested a retraction so that nobody can say I’m making these comments in secret. Let’s set the clock ticking and see how much this fellow cares about truth after all. This is day one, and counting.
If you liked this post, feel free to help support this project. Buy me a beer! (No Ratings Yet) Loading ...The Liberal Theocracy? “What?!” You ask in disbelief. A contradiction in terms, you might think. Not so. This episode is, well, long. I noted the howls of protest at my decision to shorten the episodes, and I was listening. But don’t think you’ll get this every episode! The next one will probably be a short one.
If you liked this post, feel free to help support this project. Buy me a beer! (No Ratings Yet) Loading ...For those of you who don’t know what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that has been in the news recently is all about, it’s rap to the rescue!
If you liked this post, feel free to help support this project. Buy me a beer! (No Ratings Yet) Loading ...For people many years into their academic careers this might seem like nothing to speak of, but with a relatively short list of publications and being only recently graduated, this is big news for me. 
Another paper of mine, this time my piece on William Hasker’s emergent dualism and life after death (see the article at this page), has been accepted for publication in one of the best journals of philosophy of religion out there, Philosophia Christi.
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The last month has been pretty crazy for me: changing job and moving house being among the main culprits for this state of affairs. But after much ado, here it is, Episode 15! This time I’m asking a simple question: Why be an atheist? And if you’re not one, why become one? And if you are one, why try to persuade other people to become one?
I’ve started a new trend with this episode. Some previous episodes were just too long for a lot of listeners, so I’m making a fairly strict rule that episodes shall not exceed forty minutes. This one’s just under twenty eight minutes, so I’m off to a good start. Also, I’ll only be putting episodes up each fortnight rather than weekly, just because I don’t have quite as much time as I did before – plus with all these people downloading an episode every week I literally couldn’t afford the bandwidth!
So here it is, enjoy. As always, comments either here or by email to be discussed on the show are more than welcome. And as always – subscribe using the iTunes store if you can.
Glenn Peoples
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