Atheism

Here’s Fr. Barron. Yeah, we wondered too.

From “Does religion rot teenagers’ brains?” (MercatorNet, 25 July 2011): Recently, we looked at a claim, published in a serious science journal, Intelligence, that belief in God correlates worldwide with lower IQ. From the same journal in the same year, we learned that religion correlates with lower IQ among American teenagers. [ …] If half of the Catholics and Baptist teens are sporadically observant and doctrinally indifferent (no unusual state of affairs), religious orthodoxy collapses as a predictor of IQ. So it is not clear just what Nyborg is measuring. Social class is a possibility. More. Follow UD News at Twitter!

Here, philosopher Ed Feser offers a flyswatter for weak cosmological arguments against the existence of God:

Most people who comment on the cosmological argument demonstrably do not know what they are talking about. This includes all the prominent New Atheist writers. It very definitely includes most of the people who hang out in Jerry Coyne’s comboxes. It also includes most scientists. And it even includes many theologians and philosophers, or at least those who have not devoted much study to the issue. This may sound arrogant, but it is not. You might think I am saying “I, Edward Feser, have special knowledge about this subject that has somehow eluded everyone else.” But that is NOT what I am saying. The point has nothing to do with me. What I am saying is pretty much common knowledge among professional philosophers of religion (including atheist philosophers of religion), who – naturally, given the subject matter of their particular philosophical sub-discipline – are the people who know more about the cosmological argument than anyone else does.

Presumably, he is talking about people like Victor Stenger’s young new atheists. Here’s a sample claim and a suggested response: Read More ›

Here, in “Computational and Biological Analogies for Understanding Fine-Tuned Parameters In Physics” (2010) Clement Vidal of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group in Brussels proposes a simulated Darwinverse, to get around the fact of our universe’s fine-tuning for life on Earth, glorying in his concoction’s utterly speculative nature:

A consequence of this speculative theory is that intelligent life, unravelling the universe through scientific understanding, generates a “cosmic blueprint” (a term used by Paul Davies (1989)). The cosmic blueprint can be seen as the set of physical constants; or just initial conditions of a cosmological model, if our previous reasoning holds. One can now throw a new light on the fact that cosmic evolution gave rise to scientific activity. In this view, the increasing modelling abilities of intelligent beings is not an accident, but an indispensable feature of our universe, to produce a new offspring universe. I have argued that fine-tuning of this cosmic blueprint would take place in “virtual universes”, that is in simulated universes (Vidal 2008). Read More ›

Here. At the Council for Secular Humanism.

I’d like to reach out to the new atheists and say that even if you don’t care to be friendly toward religion, I think we ought to be friendly toward one another. We’ve had a lot of differences, and yet as I mentioned, we share all that intellectual DNA. We should be able to find common ground.

To that end, perhaps we can shift the focus away from science and religion and occasionally start talking about science and spirituality, where I think we might find something that divides us less.
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