An Open Letter to Religious Believers on God and Evil

I’ve written a new essay on the problem of evil, and here’s the teaser:
Since this letter is a bit long, I’m going to repeat myself just so there’s no confusion about what the point is. The only point I have to make in this letter is that I’ve never been able to think the following [...]

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“But what are you for?” Answering a stupid question

I’m really not at all impressed with the Tea Party movement, for reasons Ed Brayton has explained at length. But I’m happy to defend them from a stupid criticism that’s been lobbed by Andrew Sullivan, especially since this is something atheists have to deal with a lot:
I like their broad philosophy:
“We’ve been running deficits for [...]

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Three philosophical problems from Plato

If you know only a little bit about Plato, what you know is probably that he had some very silly (sounding?) ideas. For example, that he believed in Forms: thing such as Beauty, Virtue, Justice, and The Good (always capitalized in English discussions of Plato), things that are supposed to be in some mysterious sense [...]

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Martin Gardner’s fideism, and related epistemological ponderings

Martin Gardner died last Saturday, provoking a round of reminiscences from the skeptical community. There’s been a fair amount of talk about Gardner’s status as the odd theist out within the skeptic movement. In a comment at Phil Plait’s blog, James Randi gave a nice, succinct explanation of Gardner’s stance (HT Massimo Pigliucci):
Martin was a [...]

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My review of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology

A couple months ago, I wrote a review on Amazon of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, a book Luke was quite enthusiastic about. The review promised a more detailed review at my blog, which I’ve sort of realized I’ll never get around to, but here’s the original:

Like Luke Muehlhauser (author of the current “most [...]

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