At Rational Religion, Umar Nasser critiques atheist Ricky Gervais on the laws of nature

2 Replies to “At Rational Religion, Umar Nasser critiques atheist Ricky Gervais on the laws of nature”

1. 1
   OldArmy94 says:

   November 8, 2021 at 2:36 pm

   I may have missed this in the conversation, but if Ricky Gervais believes that “nature” can explain everything, how does he explain “stuff” before nature existed?
2. 2
   bornagain77 says:

   November 8, 2021 at 3:30 pm

   As to Ricky Gervais repeating that old atheist slogan “I believe in one less God than you’, well, John DeRosa recently (2020) wrote a book by that very name. A book that answers the most common Slogans, Clichès, and Fallacies that Atheists use,

   One Less God Than You: How to Answer the Slogans, Clichès, and Fallacies That Atheists Use to Challenge Your Faith – June 1, 2020
   by John DeRosa
   Have you heard these ones before? The God of the Bible is a bloodthirsty dictator. Religion is the cause of war, suffering, and intolerance. Whether on Twitter, in a college quad, or at the dinner table with a freshman philosophy major, you’re probably familiar with the litany of slogans that religious skeptics employ in an attempt to rescue you from the foolish belief that God exists. Even our public schools and mainstream media often can’t help but parrot the memes that seem to leave thinking people with no alternative but to embrace atheism. How can a Christian respond? In One Less God Than You, John DeRosa breaks down twenty of the most common atheist challenges, exposes their logical weaknesses, and shows you how to craft effective answers. Atheism is more aggressive and widespread than ever before, so believers have a crucial task. Read One Less God Than You and respond with the joyful truth that God is real.
   https://www.amazon.com/One-Less-God-Than-You/dp/1683571657

   John DeRosa – audio interview
   https://www.catholic.com/audio/cal/one-less-god-than-you

   Of related note:

   Answering Atheism: I believe in one less God than you.
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHlnEQPSWFM

   GOD, GODS, AND FAIRIES
   by David Bentley Hart – June 2013
   One of the strangest claims often made by purveyors and consumers of today’s popular atheism is that disbelief in God involves no particular positive philosophy of reality,,,,
   it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be described there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments.
   Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which both experience and reason say is an ensemble of ontological contingencies, can exist entirely of itself, without any absolute source of actuality. It requires also that one resign oneself to an ultimate irrationalism: For the one reality that naturalism can never logically encompass is the very existence of nature (nature being, by definition, that which already exists); it is a philosophy, therefore, surrounded, permeated, and exceeded by a truth that is always already super naturam, and yet a philosophy that one cannot seriously entertain except by scrupulously refusing to recognize this.
   It is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content—it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic—but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.
   https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/06/god-gods-and-fairies