Posted by Dry and Uninspired  2/20/2018 9:15 pm | #1 |
I think it’s good to read the views of one’s opponents, for all sorts of reasons, but...Going through one atheist website after another, and it’s getting frustrating. There just isn’t any real meat out there, and I’m getting fed up with reading the same fallacies and weak arguments over and over again.
I recently listened to a podcast by a Christian philosopher who says the best thing they’ve got is Atheism: A Philosophical Justification by Michael Martin. Trying to get my hands on that.
Anything else?
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Posted by Miguel 2/21/2018 8:22 pm | #2 |
Nothing, it's a brute fact :^)
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Posted by Mysterious Brony 2/21/2018 8:54 pm | #3 |
@ Dry and Uninspired
On a more serious note, which Christian philosopher said that? I haven't read Michael Martin's book but I think most of the time he attacks the more contemporary philosophers rather than the older types. Anyways, try out J.L. Mackie's Miracle of Theism, Richard Gale's On the Nature and Existence of God, and Schellenberg's Divine Hiddeness and Human Reason.
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Posted by Dry and Uninspired 2/22/2018 7:49 am | #4 |
@Miguel
lol nice : - )
@Mysterious Brony
Thanks for the advice.
It was Phil Fernandes. He’s not all that well-known, but I like listening to some of his stuff.
It was kind of an old lecture though. Originally recorded on an audiocassette, lol.
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Posted by DanielCC 2/22/2018 7:59 am | #5 |
An emphatic 'No' to Martin. The man has a New Atheist attitude coupled with a slightly higher degree of philosophical literacy (to give some example he thinks maximally great parody animals e.g. unicorns, are a good objection to the ontological argument).
Work containing the best atheistic arguments and best work on philosophy of religion by an atheist philosopher are two different categories. I would nominate Richard Gale's Existence and Nature of God as containing some of the most important criticisms of theism coupled with one of the best (literally) defenses of the PSR Cosmological Argument.
Keep in mind good positive arguments for atheism are rarer than substantial criticisms of the various arguments and divine attributes. Other important works are Quentin Smith's Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language and Graham Oppy's Arguing About Gods. Smith is sporadic but produces an important new variant on the Logical Problem of Evil in relation to Divine Freedom; Oppy takes a 'sling as much mud as you can and some has got to stick' approach
Smith's website (a pain to dredge out of the achieves) has some decent essays on. 'Metaphilosophy of Naturalism' should be required reading for all philosophy of religion students.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070711000426/http://www.qsmithwmu.com:80/
Last edited by DanielCC (2/22/2018 8:00 am)
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Posted by Miguel 2/22/2018 11:43 am | #6 |
DanielCC wrote:
An emphatic 'No' to Martin. The man has a New Atheist attitude coupled with a slightly higher degree of philosophical literacy (to give some example he thinks maximally great parody animals e.g. unicorns, are a good objection to the ontological argument).
Work containing the best atheistic arguments and best work on philosophy of religion by an atheist philosopher are two different categories. I would nominate Richard Gale's Existence and Nature of God as containing some of the most important criticisms of theism coupled with one of the best (literally) defenses of the PSR Cosmological Argument.
Keep in mind good positive arguments for atheism are rarer than substantial criticisms of the various arguments and divine attributes. Other important works are Quentin Smith's Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language and Graham Oppy's Arguing About Gods. Smith is sporadic but produces an important new variant on the Logical Problem of Evil in relation to Divine Freedom; Oppy takes a 'sling as much mud as you can and some has got to stick' approach
Smith's website (a pain to dredge out of the achieves) has some decent essays on. 'Metaphilosophy of Naturalism' should be required reading for all philosophy of religion students.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070711000426/http://www.qsmithwmu.com:80/
Didn't Richard Gale become a theist?
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Posted by DanielCC 2/22/2018 1:23 pm | #7 |
An emphatic 'No' to Martin. The man has a New Atheist attitude coupled with a slightly higher degree of philosophical literacy (to give some example he thinks maximally great parody animals e.g. unicorns, are a good objection to the ontological argument).
Work containing the best atheistic arguments and best work on philosophy of religion by an atheist philosopher are two different categories. I would nominate Richard Gale's Existence and Nature of God as containing some of the most important criticisms of theism coupled with one of the best (literally) defenses of the PSR Cosmological Argument.
Keep in mind good positive arguments for atheism are rarer than substantial criticisms of the various arguments and divine attributes. Other important works are Quentin Smith's Ethical and Religious Thought in Analytic Philosophy of Language and Graham Oppy's Arguing About Gods. Smith is sporadic but produces an important new variant on the Logical Problem of Evil in relation to Divine Freedom; Oppy takes a 'sling as much mud as you can and some has got to stick' approach
Smith's website (a pain to dredge out of the achieves) has some decent essays on. 'Metaphilosophy of Naturalism' should be required reading for all philosophy of religion students.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070711000426/http://www.qsmithwmu.com:80/
Didn't Richard Gale become a theist?
I think ’Apatheist’ would have been a better description, at least going by the intro he wrote about his work on the Gale-Pruss argument (he claimed there to be neither theist, nor atheist nor agnostic). Even in Existence and Nature he’a not so much trying to prove atheism as he is to provoke dialogue by challanging recent theistic ideas (you can also see he has this Pragmatist inspired sympathy for Process Theism).
(Feel free to correct me here of course)
The reason I made that distinction about works by atheist philosophers and atheistic arguments (better to call them problems for Theism) is because I think some of the prime challenges have came from theists of different stripes e.g. Thomas Morris attack on Divine Simplicity.
Last edited by DanielCC (2/22/2018 1:26 pm)
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Posted by Ouros 2/22/2018 6:10 pm | #8 |
For what I've saw of him, Jeffery Jay Lowder is good. Still, he's not a professional philosopher if I remember well.
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Posted by Greg 2/22/2018 8:50 pm | #9 |
Going through one atheist website after another, and it’s getting frustrating. There just isn’t any real meat out there, and I’m getting fed up with reading the same fallacies and weak arguments over and over again.
My recommendation is that you devote your time to reading philosophy rather than to looking for the strongest atheistic arguments. Just about anything you find on an atheist website will be garbage. I say pick some articles and books and read them. One often finds that after engaging with the literature, it is impossible to view the problems in the same way--even though, before doing so, everything seems obvious.
I don't really know much about the state of philosophy of religion today and can't really recommend more than what others have. But I think you can find challenges to a theistic worldview outside of direct arguments for atheism. You might look at contemporary philosophy of mind, for example... JJC Smart, David Lewis, Hilary Putnam (thinking functionalist stage), Jaegwon Kim, Richard Rorty, the Churchlands, Donald Davidson (on anomalous monism)... and lots more.
Though atheists can't exactly claim him for their own (and he doesn't argue for atheism), one can imagine drawing from the later Wittgenstein to defuse 'standard' arguments from the philosophy of religion and to contest traditional conceptions of metaphysics and mind generally.
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Posted by seigneur 2/23/2018 2:12 am | #10 |
For what I've saw of him, Jeffery Jay Lowder is good. Still, he's not a professional philosopher if I remember well.
Lowder's best work is collected here https://infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/ It represents what I'd call a formalistic approach, if you are into that kind of stuff.
Secular Outpost is a blog that Lowder and Bradley Bowen started. The main blogger these days is Bradley Bowen who has responded to very many current theistic arguments in a serial manner in excruciating detail. This includes one of Feser's Proofs fairly recently. Right now Bowen is busy with an argument from Kreeft, and in the past with Plantinga, Craig, etc.
Keith Parsons, whom Feser debated in writing, moderated by Lowder (a good debate, worth checking out), is also a co-blogger at Secular Outpost.
Lowder's and Bowen's method is propositional logic. They go about things rationally, defining each concept at every step. Ordinarily their rebuttals involve either declaring a premise in the opponent's argument vague or introducing an irrelevant distinction at some point. They use "science says" arguments rather moderately.
The best about them is their attitude. They are openly anti-New Atheist. When engaging with theism, they firmly believe they are dealing with serious, though flawed, arguments and with serious, at least historically formidable, opposition.
And I personally would recommend some readings in the good old genre of naturalizing the Bible narrative, such as Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus or Thomas Mann's The Tables of the Law. Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, based on Nikos Kazantzakis' novel, and Monty Python's Life of Brian also fall in the same category. The genre emerged after a strand of liberal theology arose in Germany and France that tended to look at the Bible more in terms of art criticism rather than theology.
In my opinion, that's the best that atheism has to offer. It's also very dangerous. If you can survive that, you are truly a man of faith.
Last edited by seigneur (2/23/2018 2:17 am)
