Advocatus Atheist

Is the Resurrection Account of Jesus Fallacious? I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. –Carl Sagan U ntil now we have mostly been looking at reasons why m ost of these early Christian writings, including the Gospel accounts, cannot be considered historically accurate or reliable and how this complicates belief in Jesus . The same suspicion is cast over the whole resurrection event also. [i] Even so the resurrection of Christ, the defining characteristic which unifies Christian thought, is too big of a topic to tackle in the space of a few pages, but knowing that the historical account is untrustworthy, some interesting questions arise as to the nature of the resurrection narrative. As the title

My site is now listed at the AtheistSites.com directory page and can be voted for. More votes simply gets me more blog traffic and puts me up higher on their popularity rankings of all the listed atheist websites. Although I could care less about being the most popular, I wouldn't mind the increased traffic and a few extra subscribers. So if you have the time and goodness to help out a fellow blogger, please go to AtheistSites.com and click the "like" thumbs up for the Advocatus Atheist blog!

This is Discovery's last launch/flight. Fare thee well old girl, fare thee well, and godspeed. 0-12,700 mph in less than 7 min. That's frackin' awesome!

In his excellent 1945 essay "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell lays out six rules of what not to do when writing. Every aspiring writer should be obliged to consider Orwell's excellent advice. 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. According to Orwell, along with the key points he posited (in part one ), he informs us that these are the most elementary rules one can follow when trying to write clearly and get one's meaning across as straight foreword and efficiently as possible. It's good advice for any writer, and one which

1.       The OCD Bible Thumper type This is the sort of Christian who is bound and determined to throw every Bible verse they can at you, regardless of whether or not it makes sense, and moreover, they are bound and determined to out quote you in the process. 2.       The Pete and Repeat were sitting in a boat but Pete fell out type This is the type of Christian which will argue you in circle and keep on driving the same points home, or relying on the same fallacies, and even though their arguments crumble under scrutiny they don’t give you an inch edgewise and then prematurely declare that they have bettered you in the debate, even when you didn’t know you were actually having one. 3.       The Put a Fallacy in my back pocket for good measure type These Christians rely on inept fallacy driven arguments to make their case for them (e.g., Paley’s Watch, Pascal’s Wager, William Lane Craig’s Kalam Cosmological argument, and so on). Yet if you do engage them, onc

Usually science minded adherents can be divided into two prominent camps. First there are the realists , who hold that mathematical theories can provide direct insight into the nature of reality, and secondly there are the instrumentalists , who believe that theory provides a means for predicting what our measuring devices should register but tells us nothing about any supposed underlying reality.  I personally side with the realist camp, but regardless, the debate as to the value of science and what it can ultimately do for us rages on. Recently I have heard several objections to the notion that scientific knowledge can only be provisional, but I think this notion arises from the mysterious way in which science works against our intuition. To clarify this point we could say, with regard to scientific knowledge, the distinction which needs to be made is when considering the status of our current understanding prior to new discovery and after discovery. Thus, it seems to me, tha

In his excellent 1945 essay "Politics and the English Language" George Orwell lays out six rules to writing clearly and with purpose. Every aspiring writer should be obliged to consider Orwell's excellent advice. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly [i.e., concisely]? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly [e.g., wordy, extraneous]? I have provides brackets to clarify Orwell's meaning, even as it may prove to be unnecessary, saying a sentence is "ugly" has, itself, become an outmoded colloquialism. Regardless, the outline Orwell provides is one which I try to adhere to each and every time I set pen to paper or begin to type on my keyboard. Tho

Richard Carrier covers this topic at Skepticon 3. Both funny and informative! Worth a viewing.

[N]othing we currently know from our best sources of knowledge requires anyone to buy into one or more of the many extravagant claims that are made by those who would try to use science to promote their own particular mystical or supernatural worldview. Since these promoters introduce extraneous elements of reality not required by the data, their proposals fail the test of parsimony. It then follows that they have the burden of proving their schemes, not I the burden of disproving them.

Philhellenes does it again. Brilliant!

The breathtaking achievement of quantum mechanic's founders was to develop a mathematical formalism that dispensed with the absolute predictions intrinsic to classical physics and instead predicted such probabilities. Working from an equation Schrodinger published in 1926 (and an equivalent though somewhat more awkward equation Heisenberg wrote down in 1925), physicists can input the details of how things are now, and then calculate the probability that they will be one way, or another, or another still, at any moment in the futures... the probabilistic predictions of quantum mechanics match experimental data. Always. In more than eighty years since these ideas were developed, there has not been a single verifiable experiment or astrophysical observation whose results conflict with quantum mechanical predictions. --Brian Greene ( The Hidden Reality , pp.192-193)

The Argument from Entropy Initially I conceived the argument from entropy as a contra-argument to the Kalam cosmological argument. Also, logically speaking the argument from entropy is backed by real observation, and is based on the second law of thermodynamics, hence the argument from entropy. But what is it exactly? The argument from entropy is: 1.      God created everything (including life) 2.      Entropy is certain 3.      Entropy will extinguish all life 4.      God has the power to prevent entropy, but doesn’t 5.      A God of love would prevent entropy 6.      Therefore God cannot be a loving being Here we see that, logically speaking, entropy rules out a loving creator God. Even so, it is true that some deity may still be responsible for having created a universe capable of supporting life, but only insofar as this fulfills his ultimate purpose to, subsequently, have it annihilated (via entropy). As such, this rules out the Christian God, since we know that the Christian