Bill Pratt | January 19, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt A common theme we have revisited on this blog is that the decision to believe in God or not believe in God is more than an intellectual exercise – there are always psychological and emotional factors at play as well. This is contrary to the received wisdom of many atheists who argue that belief [...]
Bill Pratt | December 27, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt If morality is not grounded by a transcendent standard, a standard that is above all humanity, then it collapses to relativism. This concept is not at all difficult to understand, but relativism retains a negative enough connotation these days that atheists, who deny a transcendent, objective standard of morality, are still [...]
Bill Pratt | December 26, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Four times in the past year I have heard the following kind of statement from atheists: “Religious people are dangerous because they think they have answers to ultimate questions.” Twice these comments were uttered by personal friends of mine, and twice I heard them expressed by atheists in debates that I [...]
Bill Pratt | December 21, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt Former atheist Richard Morgan describes his journey to Christianity in a fascinating article at The Christian Post. Morgan participated heavily in the Richard Dawkins website forums, but what he found there turned him away from atheism to Christianity. Here is an excerpt: More than the religious debate, it was his interest [...]
Bill Pratt | August 19, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the first 2 posts of this series, I presented Richard Dawkins’ “answer” to the question “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?” At the end of part 2, I said that Dawkins did not actually answer the question, even though that’s what he led the reader to believe he [...]
Bill Pratt | August 17, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In Dawkins’s next chapter, “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist” he “exposes” the Bible’s moral commands to be largely immoral and hopelessly outdated. What the reader will find in this chapter is Dawkins riffing on how morally backward the Bible is. In fact, Dawkins concludes that “those who wish [...]
Bill Pratt | August 15, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, there is a section entitled “If there is no God, why be good?” I eagerly devoured this section as I sincerely wanted to see what answer Dawkins would give. After all, he is the most prominent intellectual atheist in the world today, right? What did [...]
Bill Pratt | August 5, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few blog posts dedicated to discussions of atheism (there is no god or gods) and the philosophy of naturalism (all that exists is found in the material universe). Atheism and naturalism generally go [...]
Bill Pratt | July 27, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the last chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, he introduces the metaphor of Middle World. The idea of Middle World is that the human sensory organs have only evolved in order to help humans survive in a world of medium-sized objects moving at relatively slow speeds (compared to the [...]
Bill Pratt | July 20, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt The question of the origin of human rationality plagues the atheistic naturalist worldview – the worldview that says that all that exists ultimately is matter governed by the laws of physics. If every event that has ever occurred and ever will occur is determined by physical laws, then how are humans [...]
