Tag Archives: What is Theism?

“Liberal” and “Orthodox” Views on the Faith of Abraham

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AbrahamA while back I did a post called The Faith of Abraham where I discussed the considerable challenges surrounding the story of Abraham being told by God to sacrifice Isaac. I have been in conversation recently with a blogger from Wheat and Tares about this story because it really bothers him — to the point where he has come up with ways to discount it as truly having come from God. As the discussion went on we agreed to ‘take it public’ because its such an interesting topic for discussion. His response to my post is found here. He then posted it on W&T today.

One thing I’ve long believed is that this story largely defines the difference between what it generally means to be “conservative” vs. “liberal” when it comes to religion. Maybe I’m over emphasizing this, but this tends to be a pretty good litmus test. Further, this particular story and the discussion that follows is a fairly straightforward example of why I self-identify as a “conservative” despite being quite literally 25% atheist and only 75% believer. Those that know me know that I believe that liberal theology is a rational non-starter. It doesn’t even make it out the rational gate for me and this is a great example of why.

Summary of Liberal Friend’s Argument

First, let me summarize his argument, though I hope you’ll all go read his full post yourselves. Continue reading →

What is Morality? The Relationship Between Morality and God

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Note: This post takes several of my threads (i.e. What is morality?, What is atheism?, What is theism?, What is religion?, One Moral Will, and the concept of meaning-memes) and shows that they are all deeply inter-related.

This was the final conclusion I was able to draw from my last post on Supernatural Morality:

Theists can rationally justify (though they do not prove) their belief in objective morality via their additional premises (i.e. the existence of an afterlife, with perfect knowledge, and inescapable consequences). Atheists cannot justify their belief in objective morality and are merely being rationally incoherent when they believe in (or act as if there is) objective morality despite all the evidence against it.

Now, of course, this is probably a hollow victory if there is in fact no God. If there is no God, does it really matter that morality is a delusion? This is a thought for a future post. But the question does point out one thing: there is some sort of link or connection between belief in God and belief in Morality. At a minimum, that connection is the rational coherence of morality as stated in the quote above. (Making here some possible allowances for an “atheist” that receive answers to prayers or believe in heaven.)

I now want to explore the relationship between belief in God and belief in Morality further, for there is clearly some sort of link there that few speak enough of. Continue reading →

What is Morality? Error Theory and Supernatural Morality

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Note: For those that don’t want to read the whole post, there is a short summary at the end. But remember the rule of summaries: they are not equivalent to the whole argument.

In my first post on Error Theory, I summarized Richard Joyce’s arguments that demonstrated morality was rationally incoherent in a naturalistic (only) worldview. In my second post I summarized his arguments that evolution can’t vindicate morality, and in fact undermines it as objectively existing. (See shorter summary here.)

Joyce, being an atheist, then goes on to argue against any supernatural view of morality. (i.e. arguments in favor of morality that invoke the existence of a “God”, Something-Like-God, or any other type of invisible world that our current science cannot see.) In this post, I am going to explore the idea of Supernatural Morality as well as include a short summary of Joyce’s argument against it. At this point, I’m just exploring, not arguing for or against. But no discussion on morality would be complete without considering the possibility that morality stems from the existence of a supernatural reality (or Being) that we do not yet see. Continue reading →

Lewisians and Lovecraftians: Another Way to Look at Religious Beliefs?

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This post is in part an olive leaf to AndrewS as an attempt to satisify his concerns with loosely defining atheism. I firmly believe that arguing over definitions is pointless in a rational conversation (though probably valuable in a political one). So I see no reason to not give it to him. Thoughts on that topic lead to this post.

In my past posts, I defined an Ideal Rational Atheist like this: Continue reading →

The Beliefs of Atheists

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In my last two posts I first made an attempt to define Atheism then an attempt to define Theism.  Granting that those terms have many and varied possible (and overlapping) definitions, I feel that what I’ve come up with will serve my purposes of being sufficiently precise while still being pretty close to how we normally use the terms most of the time. And this is the most we can hope for of any sort of definition of (non-mathematical) words. Let me repeat the definitions here: Continue reading →