Month: June 2012

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (ECREE), Part 3: Is ECREE False? A Reply to T. Kurt Jaros

As a follow-up to my last post on extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (ECREE), I’m going to respond to a blog post by T. Kurt Jaros. As in my previous posts,let B represent our background information; E represent our evidence to be explained; H be an explanatory hypothesis, and ~H be the falsity of H. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence (ECREE), Part 3: Is ECREE False? A Reply to T. Kurt Jaros

How to Think or What to Think?

John Loftus raises an issue that I would like to address: Should professors teach students how to think or what to think? http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/06/open-challenge-to-dr-keith-parsons-and.html  John gives a link to an article by philosopher Peter Boghossian: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/07/192/boghossian Boghossian challenges what John calls the “received” view of pedagogy. The received view can be summed up by the slogan How to Think or What to Think?

Argument Against the Resurrection of Jesus – Part 24

In Joseph “Rick” Reinckens’s webpage A Lawyer Examines the Swoon Theory we get a short snippet from Origen that allegedly confirms a Roman practice of stabbing victims of crucifixion with a spear:  In his Commentary on Matthew, Origen, one of the early Church Fathers, says the lance thrust to Jesus was administered “according to Roman custom, below the armpit.” Argument Against the Resurrection of Jesus – Part 24

“Alvin Plantinga on Paul Draper’s evolutionary atheology: implications of theism’s noncontingency” (DOI) 10.1007/s11153-012-9361-6

My article with the above name will appear in an upcoming issue of The International Journal of Philosophy of Religion, and has just been made available online to anyone with access to an institution with a SpringerLink license.  Here is the abstract taken from SpringerLink (http://www.springerlink.com/content/237w067637655738/): In his recently published Where the Conflict Really Lies: “Alvin Plantinga on Paul Draper’s evolutionary atheology: implications of theism’s noncontingency” (DOI) 10.1007/s11153-012-9361-6

The Poverty of Theistic Morality

In an effort to increase visibility of an article that has been largely ignored by theists, I thought it would be interesting to discuss what Adolf Grünbaum has to say about the theistic implications of morality in his excellent essay, “The Poverty of Theistic Morality.” He writes: One vital lesson of that analysis will be The Poverty of Theistic Morality

William Lane Craig’s Critique of Bart Ehrman on the Probability of Miracles

As the saying goes, I have to “call ’em as I see ’em.” I just read, for the first time, the transcript of William Lane Craig’s debate with Bart Ehrman. I read, with great interest, Craig’s first rebuttal, where he makes extensive use of Bayes’s Theorem (BT) to critique two of Ehrman’s statements. Those two William Lane Craig’s Critique of Bart Ehrman on the Probability of Miracles