It’s tempting to see the accommodationist vs.Gnu atheist debate as a debate about two questions. One is about of principles: if science and religion do conflict, would we have to tell the truth about that? The other is about priorities: is it more important to get evolution taught in public schools, or more important to [...]
Category Archives: ethics
What Christians don’t believe about sin and why it matters
If you read atheist polemics against Christianity, Christian ideas about sin come up relatively infrequently. I know I’ve been tempted to dismiss what Christians say about sin as a superficial rationalization for the one really vile doctrine of Christianity, the doctrine that God damns people for unbelief. Recently, though, I’ve realized just how wrong this [...]
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism & Bruce Almighty
Most religious believers in the U.S. are not Rick Warren. Most religious believers in the U.S. are not William Lane Craig. In some ways, this is not obvious from the statistics: surveys regularly report things like “half of Americans are creationists,” or “half of Americans accept Biblical inerrancy.” But in spite of these statistics, the [...]
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 [...]