A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Atheism

  • What’s the appeal of Christianity without God?

    I was only previously aware of Daniel C. Maguire as a theologian on the liberal end of Roman Catholicism. But it seems he now rejects belief in God altogether and has written a book called Christianity without God. I’m not interested in criticizing anyone for what they can or can’t believe. Atheism can be a Read more

  • New atheism as 19th-century positivism redux

    This article puts its finger on one of the problems I’ve long had with the so-called new atheism: [I]n its basic outlines [A.C.] Grayling’s humanism is that of the nineteenth-century positivists, who built a philosophy around their belief in the perfectability of human nature. For Grayling, and for the other New Atheists, reason doesn’t just Read more

  • Making Sense of Evolution: Multi-layered explanation

    I’m reading Catholic theologian John Haught’s Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God, and the Drama of Life. Haught is a well-known advocate of “theistic evolution” and argues that theology hasn’t adequately come to grips with Darwin’s impact on our understanding of the world, which he thinks should have serious repercussions on key theological concepts. Theistic Read more

  • Taking atheism seriously

    Most of the responses I’ve seen by Christians to the “new atheism,” whether in print or online, have come in one of two forms: combative defensiveness or smug complacency. The first is exhibited by those (usually self-appointed) defenders of the faith who take to the ramparts to refute the atheists arguments with their own knock-down Read more

  • Ruse on The Moral Landscape

    Philosopher Michael Ruse takes a sledgehammer to Sam Harris’s new book on morality: I don’t know what Harris studied in his philosophy courses as an undergrad at Stanford, but they don’t seem to have penetrated very deeply. He denounces philosophers before him (including myself, I should admit) without really addressing the challenge their arguments pose Read more

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract Read more

  • Varieties of atheism

    Brandon points out the problem with lumping all contemporary atheist thinkers together as “new atheists.” He highlights the work of philosopher Owen Flanagan, whose work I’m not particularly familiar with, as an atheist who doesn’t necessarily fit the new atheist paradigm. It sounds to me–at least from Brandon’s description–that Flanagan is what I would call Read more

  • Priorities

    I like this, from Brandon: Here and there over the past few years I’ve seen a great many Christians who are of the opinion that argument with the so-called New Atheists should be a major priority among Christians, and I recently saw another instance of this. They don’t generally ask my advice, but whenever people Read more

  • Eagleton on Jesus and “sprituality”

    I haven’t read literary critic Terry Eagleton’s new book on the “new atheists,” and I’m frankly not that interested in the whole new atheist phenomenon period (I haven’t seen much to indicate that one wouldn’t be much better off reading, say, David Hume for razor-sharp critiques of religion). But Kim at “Connexions” has some provocative Read more

  • Doubting Dawkins

    An excerpt from Keith Ward’s Why There Almost Certainly Is a God, a response to Richard Dawkins. (In Ward’s defense, he’s been debating Dawkins for years, so this isn’t cheap bandwagon jumping.) The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one Read more