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Certainly that logical fallacy, a superficial ignorant parroted polemic (such as invokes everything from the Flood to AIDS as a moral argument against God), can be answered.There simply is no contradiction btwn God being omnipotent (and omniscient) and all good (from whom all good has come, as the creator of an exceedingly vast, systematicity ordered universe, exquisitely fine-tuned for our physical life), and the allowance of evil,For unless you want a world in which mankind is like a cloud or a robot, then allowing evil is a necessary good if:Man is to be a being with the ability to make...

Let me be honest from the start of this. I’m not religious. I’m an agnostic. That is, I cannot say with any degree of certainty whether God exists or not. That would be any God, Christian, Muslim, or take your pick. My belief is much like a coin, flipped into the air to land, improbably, on edge and stand there. Perhaps wobbling and teetering a bit, but not ready to take that leap of faith one way or the other. To me, it seems that deciding to believe that God’s there or not, has to be done without the benefit...

While discussing religion with Stephen Colbert on the "Late Show," Ricky Gervais described himself as an "agnostic atheist." Gervais said, "No one knows if there's a God, so technically, everyone's agnostic. We don't know. An agnostic atheist is someone who doesn't know if there's a God or not, as no one does."And from Gervais's point of view, such a statement makes perfect sense. After all, one would expect a self-proclaimed agnostic atheist to assume that even Christians don't know for a fact that God exists, right?In reality, you can know for sure that God is real by entering into a...

In my previous article, I originally defined atheism as “the rejection of the possibility that ‘God’ exists” because that is how I’ve understood the word from the time I spent studying theodicy (God and the problem of evil). But many “atheist” commenters disagreed with this definition because their self-designation was based on belief statements that didn’t align with my knowledge statement. This article explains the differences between the viewpoints and the logic behind them. Atheism is commonly called the belief that there aren’t any gods or the lack of belief in gods. But in a more accurate, philosophical sense, it...

THIS Christmas our family will go to church. The service is held in a beautiful old church in the charming town of Walpole, N.H., just over the border from Vermont. The Lord’s Prayer hangs on the wall behind the sanctuary. A lectern rises above the nave to let the pastor look down on his flock. The pews and the side stalls have the stern, pure lineaments suited to the Colonial congregation that once came to church to face God. Except that this church is Unitarian. Unitarianism emerged in early modern Europe from those who rejected a Trinitarian theology in preference...

Kids abandoning their parents' faith is a pretty well-trodden trope in pop culture, but two shows are turning the tables a bit. This season, both The Good Wife and The Americans feature teenage daughters of atheist parents who've converted to Christianity.The Good Wife's Grace Florrick (Makenzie Vega) has been slowly growing more devout since season two and was baptized in season three. Her atheist mother Alicia (Julianna Margulies) has been generally accepting of the conversion, but tension has developed in the wake of a death close to Alicia, due to Grace's repeated insistence that the deceased is in heaven....

Transcendence is to the sci-fi genre what Noah is to the Bible. Both are poorly conceived reboots of a literary form into pseudo-visionary garbage. Each film also exemplifies the current trend of agnostic filmmakers playing God. In Transcendence, Johnny Depp, as the obviously named Will Caster, unleashes his berserk world-dominating ambitions after he dies and is resurrected as an artificially intelligent computer program with the power to “overcome the limits of biology.” In Noah, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky reconceives the Biblical story of the Flood and God’s covenant with man through His servant (played by Russell Crowe) as a smart-ass...

Published: July 20, 2012 at 5:54 PM BODH GAYA, India, July 20 (UPI) -- The 2,500-year-old tree under which Gautama Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment is alive and healthy, Indian scientists said Thursday. The Bodhi tree, a large Sacred Fig (Ficus religiosa,) is in Bodh Gaya in India's eastern state of Bihar, about 60 miles from the state capital of Patna. "The Bodhi tree is fully healthy," Subhash Nautiyal of the Forest Research Institute in India's northern state of Uttarakhand said. Nautiyal and colleagues examined the tree after removing the cement slabs around its base, China's Xinhua News...

Just as the atheist Richard Dawkins discloses he doubts God's non-existence, Richard Holloway, Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh, asserts his doubt in the Deity's existence. The atheist and the bishop have wound up at the same place. In the case of the world's most outspoken non-believer, the step is progression, but in the case of the leader in the Scottish Episcopal Church, the step is regression. "I can't be sure God does not exist," said Dawkins, crusader against belief in God, during a debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury February 24. The next day Holloway was quoted as saying he can't...

Why didn't Mubarak send in the tanks? Why didn't Tahrir Square turn into Tiananmen Square? Is the Egyptian regime less cruel than its Chinese counterpart? How is it that all the dictatorships in the Arab world have suddenly gotten weak in the knees over unarmed civilians doing nothing more than demonstrating? After all, the regime is all-powerful; they have built their security forces over decades in concentric circles so that the inner circle will owe its existence and power to the ruler and will always do his bidding. And if the need will arise, it will always force the ruler's...

If you want to know about God, you might want to talk to an atheist. Heresy? Perhaps. But a survey that measured Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists and agnostics knew more, on average, than followers of most major faiths. In fact, the gaps in knowledge among some of the faithful may give new meaning to the term "blind faith." A majority of Protestants, for instance, couldn't identify Martin Luther as the driving force behind the Protestant Reformation, according to the survey, released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Four in 10 Catholics misunderstood the...

Judeo-Christian religion in the United States is far from dead, but other religions are increasingly viable. In addition to Radical Islam ("eighty percent of the prisoners who 'find faith' in prison convert to Islam,"  generally of the radical kind), Leftism, Multiculturalism, Progressivism and the like seem pervasive. Even the Church of Global Warming, while modestly weakened, remains sufficiently vibrant that absolution may yet be had by buying dispensations. Mere ideologies perhaps, aside from Radical Islam, but their adherents bring religious passion to their dogmas and consider it churlish, if not criminal, to question them. While the Judeo-Christian religions remain vibrant,...

The ideal of the coolly rational scientific observer, completely independent, free of all preconceived theories, prior philosophical, ethical and religious commitments, doing investigations and coming to dispassionate, unbiased conclusions that constitute truth, is nowadays regarded by serious philosophers of science (and, indeed, most scientists) as a simplistic myth...

Darwin’s bulldog—Thomas H. Huxley --snip-- Huxley, although an unbeliever, was thoroughly familiar with the gospel, and had little time for Christians who compromised their position by supporting the anti-biblical belief of evolutionary naturalism. He wrote: ...

Does it ever occur to anybody (religious) out there that maybe, just maybe, their “Holy Book” is a crock? Maybe it’s just a 2,000 (+/-) year old urban legend gone horribly righteous and viral?

For the opening interview on Friday's Real Time, leftist talk show host Bill Maher interviewed fellow secularist Sam Harris, noted author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Harris was on to promote his new 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation The Reason Project, of which Maher is a member of the advisory board.I was delighted by this opening interview. In the summer of 2007 I wrote a three-part series on the "New Atheists" for WTHR. I interviewed secularists, believers, and those who find themselves falling somewhere between the two. I end up in the third category, thus I...

What are the implications of God's existence or non-existence?

It started out as the dream job for a passionate Christian -- reporting about religion for a major newspaper. But writing about other people's religions ended up costing William Lobdell his own. The former Los Angeles Times reporter chronicled his soul-wrenching, emotion-laden journey in the recently released book "Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America -- and Found Unexpected Peace," published by Harper Collins. Lobdell's spiritual journey led him from an uninspired Protestant childhood to agnosticism before he attended a weekend Christian men's retreat where he was "born again." Concerned with what he considered...

David Hume was a Scottish philospoher well known for his attack on the principle of causality - the principle that nothing can occur or exist without a cause. He believed that although one event (set of impressions) always preceded another, this did not prove that the first event caused the second. The constant conjunction of two events, he said, built up the expectation that the second event would take place after the first. But this was nothing more than a strong belief or habit of mind taught by experience. One could never prove that there were causal connections among impressions....

Lesson 34: The First Commandment "Come let us praise the Lord with joy:  let us joyfully sing to God our savior.  Let us come before His presence with thanksgiving; and make a joyful noise to Him with psalms.  For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.  For in His hand are all the ends of the earth:  and the heights of the mountains are His.  For the sea is His, and He made it:  and His hands formed the dry land.  Come let us adore and fall down:  and weep before the Lord that...