Getting random stuff organised
You can find the original analogy at: A Conversation Between Two Babies Inside A Mother’s Womb What’s wrong with it is that the second baby is guessing. He or she happens to be guessing right, because that’s the way the person who wrote the story made it happen. So what? I can write a story which includes …
Continue reading “The ‘Two Babies’ analogy – what’s wrong with it?”
My claim to be a strong atheist, and to know that no gods exist, is founded on my understanding — as an educated and fluent speaker and writer of English — of the way that the word ‘know’ is used in ordinary English speech and writing. This allows me to make claims like the following, …
Continue reading “I am not an agnostic, because I understand what ‘know’ means”
Is it possible that… … gods exist? … there is an afterlife? …there are new forms of science we haven’t yet discovered? …Satan used a miracle to alter DNA? … etc, etc, etc… It’s possible, but it’s a vacuous possibility, in that there is no evidence whatsoever to support it. A vacuous possibility is a hypothesis which is …
Continue reading “‘Is it possible that…’ questions are usually daft. Here’s why.”
‘Living’ is not the sort of thing that can have a purpose. An individual life — of a human, or another animal, or a plant — can be said to have a purpose if it is largely or wholly devoted to satisfying some specific human demand or requirement; thus the purpose of an orange tree’s life might …
Science says: “When X happens, Y happens.” Religion says: “When X happens, Y happens, unless some supernatural force prevents Y from happening or causes something else to happen instead.” Science asks: “How can we know when supernatural forces will intervene, and what they will cause to happen or prevent from happening?” Religion says: “We can’t.” …
As a materialist, I accept the consequences of materialism. One consequence in particular is that the behaviour of atomic particles is not predictable on an individual basis. A brick falls to the ground when we release it, for instance, because most of the atoms (electrons, quarks) in it react to a downward force, but there …
Every argument which is advanced with the intention of proving God exists begins by attempting to redefine ‘proof’ or ‘God’ or ‘existence’ — and sometimes any two or even all three of these. In this post I’m going to look at the last of these terms — ‘existence’ — and examine what it means, particularly …
So many of the questions atheists are asked on Quora and elsewhere boil down to a simple formula: “You might be wrong!” In the following example I’ve tried to show why this is a futile and vacuous assertion. The scene is a university lecture theatre. Professor Wai is speaking: PROFESSOR: “Thus we can see that …
… studied every religion? … read every book about God? … heard about my particular version of God? … read [insert name of book or website here]? There are thousands — probably tens of thousands — of books written about Santa Claus, in a variety of languages, by people past and present all over the …
Continue reading “How can someone be an atheist when they haven’t…”
Something only counts as an explanation if it tells us how to achieve a goal, or how we could achieve it if we had the resources. If you successfully explain to me how to make brownies, then — given the ingredients and an oven — I can make brownies. But if you tell me ‘brownies …
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