William Lane Craig’s request that Richard Dawkins debate him in Oxford was refused on a number of reasonable grounds. Dawkins has a prior engagement that same night in London, considers Craig insignificant and unsophisticated as a religious thinker compared with those Dawkins has debated and those he has had to decline purely on grounds of [...]
Richard Swinburne is one of the world’s most famous theologians and, amongst those who find any theology at all convincing, one of the world’s most respected to boot, right up there with Alvin Plantinga. The University of Oxford has a student society for atheists, secularists and humanists that has had many atheist and theist speakers, [...]
Certain schools of nonsense – perhaps all of them – have “sophisticated” advocates their critics are told must be countered for said criticisms to count for anything. Religion is a classic example of this at the time of writing. “Sophisticated theologians”, we are told, are the ones we must refute. One point I think needs [...]
One thing I don’t recall hearing critics of religion ever saying, but which I think should be said, is that the effort by scientifically literate theists, including religious scientists, to render their religious views compatible with science often requires them to adopt views at least as empirically ridiculous as their religious views. (I will in [...]
I’m a new writer here, and I’m a physicist, and we scientists always react to theists trying to use the findings of our field to argue for a god by noticing their arguments get the science wrong. One of the most popular attempts of that sort nowadays concerns the “fine tuning” of physics, so my [...]