In a post yesterday I discussed a paper by philosopher Stephen Law of the University of London where he used a thought experiment and something that he called ‘the contamination principle’ (P2) to cast doubt on the claims of whether a historical Jesus existed.
Category Archive: Atheism and philosophy
May 24 2012
Thought experiments on the historicity of Jesus-1: The contamination principle
Readers may recall an earlier post on the question of whether the Jesus of the Bible is based, however loosely, on an actual historical figure living in that region of the world at that time (as claimed by the historicists) or whether he is an entirely fictional character based on myths and legends (as asserted …
Apr 17 2012
Is philosophy science?
In general, questions such as “Is (subject X) a science?” are not very useful. After all, what does it matter what label you assign to something? In certain situations though, the label matters quite a lot. In the US, because of the Establishment Clause, the answer to the question of whether a theory is scientific …
Mar 25 2012
Reason Rally report
I attended a portion of the Reason Rally yesterday in Washington DC. It drizzled or rained gently most of the time, which cast a bit of a damper on the proceedings but people were in good spirits. The crowd that attended should dispel the notion that the nonbelievers movement consist of old, white guys. It …
Feb 15 2012
Existence and universal claims
An interesting discussion has broken out in the comments section of the post The weak historical evidence for Jesus that is related to the question of where the burden of proof lies when promoting or refuting a claim. Those who started reading my blogs only after I moved to Freethought Blogs have been (so far …
Jan 27 2012
How does one scientifically disprove something?
In the article titled Buddhism Without the Hocus-Pocus in the The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 13, 2012, page B4, unfortunately behind a subscription wall) by Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy at Duke University, that I wrote about yesterday, the author quotes the Dalai Lama as saying that if
Jan 16 2012
Why agnostics may find the religious more congenial than atheists
A regular reader of my former blog, who describes himself as a fence-sitting agnostic, commented in response to one of my posts at my previous site: One objection I do have against this blog is the sense of superiority it conveys and the derision with which it refers to the religious. Atheism somehow seems to …
Dec 15 2011
Misconceptions about Nazi ideology
One popular trope is that the Nazi racist ideology was atheistic and Darwinian, and the conclusion is drawn that atheism and evolution are thus responsible for all its evils. This was a central theme in the documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. But while that argument has always been specious at best, this article by Coel …
Dec 12 2011
A clearer definition of atheist
(This is my article that appeared in the July/August 2011 issue of the New Humanist magazine that appeared there with the title No Doubt.) Charles Darwin believed that God was not required to explain nature and strongly opposed the later attempts by Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, to argue that …
Dec 01 2011
African-American atheists
The New York Times had an interesting article (which for some reason was in its Fashion & Style section) about the growing open atheism in the black community, one that has traditionally been seen as more religious and more disapproving of atheism than the population at large. The article says that less than one-half of …
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