The classical theistic components of God, his characteristics of being all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing don’t work very well together. This has been something which I have sought to elucidate over the years, so I thought I would compile a synopsis of where we are at with the idea of OmniGod, and what he has created. These are good arguments, I believe, and I would love to see my readers interact with them, and I would love to see theists of all natures take them to task to see if they stand up. Bookmark this page and return to it, if you will – there’s quite a lot here! I would like to see this as a growing compendium.
Category Free Will and Determinism
I did an interview yesterday on the popular UK podcast Godless Spellchecker mainly on the topic of free will, but…
I have just had an article published in the “Free Inquiry” magazine, looking at whether society is coming to grips…
What it says on the tin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L5XbuxKNI8 A massive frustration in the lack of defining the terms led to a…
The flagship BBC religion, ethics and politics show, The Big Questions, this week featured a whole hour on free will. I was asked to attend ass a front row guest on the subject in York for the pre-recorded show last Sunday. Here are my thoughts on the actual content of what was discussed.
I have been having a long-standing argument with a relative newcomer to our pub philosophy group (The Tippling Philosophers) over free will. He believes in libertarian free will, though it does appear to be largely based on an argument from wishful thinking and being unwilling to confront the ramifications of not having it, rather than a robust understanding of the philosophical debate.
Fellow Feather is an atheist (whom I converse with over email) who has posted a series of adverts directly and confrontationally aimed at and asking questions of Christians. The adverts have been in different publications of varying sizes, but have always been fascinating, as this one was which I post before. FF has now compiled these into an almost coffee table-sized book which feels and looks great.
It finally came to pass as the producers liked the cut of my jib when they phoned me to ask me about my views on free will; a sort of a test run to see if I sounded OK. I passed.
As a determinist who believes that free will is an illusion, the argument over whether we have libertarian free will or not is somewhat passé. The interesting debates happen over whether we have moral responsibility or not, what any ramifications of this would be, and what approaches we should have to crime and punishment.
The weekly BBC programme dealing with religion, morality, ethics etc., called The Big Questions and hosted by Nicky Campbell, have…
Having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
…or at least not wholly right.
For those across the pond who are not familiar with the Hillsborough disaster, it was a a grim day in Sheffield in 1989 when 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died (with 766 injuries), being crushed to death in surging crowds in the old terrace-style ground enclosures.
My friend Julian Haydon questions this: ANSWERS BY AN HONEST CHRISTIAN Did anything exist before the Creation? …Only God,…
And now for something completely different. This has come through my friend Julian Haydon, and it a great piece of creative atheology, dripping with deterministic wordsmithying I love it. Let me know what you think.
One approach to the growing evidence, and immutable logical philosophy, for the fact of (adequate) determinism and free will as an illusion of the mind is that of the illusionist.
This is a nice little watch. I have a lot of time for the quarantine approach to which Caruso refers.…
On the Skeptic Ink back channels one of my writing colleagues was asking about genetic influences on homosexuality, in answer to a conversation with a reader about a book “My Genes Made Me Do It” which seems to decry the use of genetics to understand the determination of homosexuality.
‘Trick Slattery, who has written a really good introductory book & ebook on determinism, has produced this infographic comparing determinism…
This fascinating article is from ScienceDaily. It is something I have talked about before with friends, that you can tell so much about a person (or at least think you can) from a cursory look to the face. And, indeed, your brain is doing n awful lot of this non-conscious computation along those lines:
I am speaking at Bournemouth tonight, on free will. It is at the Bournemouth Skeptics in the Pub. Be there!…