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The Epicurean Paradox
I recently pointed out that it’s not my job as an atheist to disprove the existence of gods. While this is true, it is a fun mental exercise. My favorite is the Epicurean Paradox. First, let’s examine the claim of a god’s existence. Most theologies attribute God with three traits. He is omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing), and omnibenevolent (all loving). Some schools of thought add or remove from these three, but these are generally agreed upon by monotheists. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh…
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Bad Arguments: Shifting The Burden of Proof
The misunderstanding of the burden of proof is one of the biggest reasons logical arguments with theists fail. The person making the claim has the burden of proof. That’s how it works. It’s your job to prove your point, not their job to prove you wrong. If you can’t defend your argument with proof, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong, but it does mean that there’s no reason to believe you.
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Bad Arguments: Personal Incredulity
Welcome to another edition of Bad Arguments. Today’s topic is Personal Incredulity, which is a subset of the the logical fallacy, Argumentum ad Ignorantiam (Argument from Ignorance). This is usually phrased as, “Well how else can you explain (insert topic that isn’t understood by the person)?”
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Why Is This News: Katy Perry vs. Islam
*sigh*. This is the first time that I’m tired of a story and I haven’t even started ranting about it. The only reason I’m even talking about this is because it is the perfect story for me. Everything about this story is utterly ridiculous. At no point in my life would I have thought I’d see “Katy Perry” and “Islam” in the same sentence. It’s like every pronoun in this story was an ad lib. The only good thing about this story is that it gave me an excuse to do a Google Image search for “Katy Perry.” That said, I have a lot to talk about, so let’s get…
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Interview: God
At first, I wanted to do a mock debate with god, but that wasn’t really functional, so instead, I’m going to go the interview route. In my last interview, I addressed mental illness and it’s affect and perception by someone who was bipolar. Keeping with the mental illness concept, please welcome God. This is so blasphemous, I kind of expect death threats.
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Minirant: Evolution vs. Creationism
With the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate yesterday, I wanted to clarify one HUGE problem that never gets addressed. Creationism is not the rival to evolution. It’s the rival to the Big Bang and abiogenesis. In Mr. Ham’s opening argument, he accused schools of “imposing molecules to man evolution as fact.” That’s because it is. It also has nothing to do with the origin of the universe.
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Bad Arguments: Pascal’s Wager
Over the last few years, I’ve really started studying apologetics. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, “apologetics” is the discipline of defending a position, usually, religious positions. Anytime you hear someone defend or give a reason for their faith, that is called apologetics. This is a practice that has gone back as long as… well as long as people have defended their opinions. In general, and for this article, I’m limiting it to the defense of religious beliefs. Actually, I’m going to limit it even further, and talk about one argument, Pascal’s Wager.
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In Which I Try To Say Positive Things
If you’ve spent longer than 5 minutes on this site or in my company, you know I complain about everything. For the sake of challenging myself, both creatively and as a writer, I asked my friends to name topics about which I had to say nice things. The goal here was for them to take things that are generally bad or have negative connotations, and I had to find the bright side in them. I only got three suggestions, the first one being ridiculously easy. So to fill in this article, I picked my most common complaints to see if I could say nice things about them too. Well let’s…
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Religious Thinking
For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking to a Catholic on Twitter. We’ve discussed a wide range of topics, and while the conversation never really goes anywhere, it’s been interesting to get a Novus Ordo (Modern) Catholic’s take on things, to compare to my Tridentine (Traditional) Catholic upbringing. Most recently, I said that I was against religion because of all of the bad things it does. He (side note, I don’t actually know if it’s a man or a woman) asked what Catholic teachings say they should do bad things.
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Bad Arguments: If Man Came From Apes, Why Are There Still Apes?
I love this question. I see it a lot from creationists. To them, it’s the ace up their sleeve or the 8 ball in the corner pocket. They expect that someone who understands evolution will see that question, and think, “Wow. I never thought of that. Evolution must be wrong.” When in reality, the smart person just shakes their head and laughs.
