"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
A long time favourite of this blog, Msgr. Pope, recently published an article looking at morality from an atheistic perspective. The list of questions at the end of the article are particularly good material to chew over.
I also recently saw this video on the same subject:
Some people say that God doesn’t exist because they don’t understand His actions. But then I have no idea what air-traffic controllers, earthworms or morris dancers are up to, and most people seem to think they all exist…
– Milton Jones
I just finished listening to a conversation between Dr. Scott Sullivan and Dr. Peter Kreeft. Dr. Kreeft has been one of my all-time favourite speakers, philosophers and authors and I recently bought Dr. Sullivan’s course on logic. Their conversation is great and Dr. Kreeft shines as always 🙂
I recently came across the Catholic Contrast video channel. It’s rather good. Here’s their response to the question “Are religious debates pointless?”…
The other day I was pleased to discover that Catholic Answers have put up on YouTube the entire debate of Trent Horn with atheist Dan Barker entitled “God: Supreme Being or Imaginary Friend?”
A while back, I posted about Catholic apologist Trent Horn’s debate with Dan Barker on the subject of atheism, as well as his debate with Cecili Chadwick concerning abortion. Well, later this month Trent is going to be debating Dr. Richard Carrier on the historicity of Jesus. You can register for tickets here. Since I couldn’t find one, I also created a Facebook event:
This debate should be particularly interesting since Dr. Carrier is a prominent Jesus Mythicist and, to the best of my knowledge, the only historian with a PhD in Ancient History who casts serious doubt of Jesus’ existence. He’s published a couple of books on the subject where he explains why he thinks the scholarly consensus is wrong and what historical methods should be used instead.
If you’ve been to the other debates which Trent has done, you’ll know that this is sure to be a charitable and engaging debate. See you there 🙂
Up until now, all of the “Quick Apology” posts have dealt with Catholic-Protestant disputes. Today I would like to address a Theist-Atheist issue. I wrote this post several weeks ago, but I heard this specific objection was just a few days ago…
Probably as a result of the writings of the “New Atheists”, I’ve heard with increasing regularity the statement:
“You don’t believe in Thor do you? You’re almost an atheist – I just believe in one less god than you”
The suggestion here is that Christians are, in fact, basically atheists since they don’t believe in the gods of other religions. The atheist is just like the Christian except that she rejects the Christian God as well.
There’s the suggestion that, since Thor doesn’t exist, then neither does the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, this doesn’t really follow, does it? After all, does the existence of counterfeit money mean that real money doesn’t exist? I hope not, otherwise I’ve worked 40 hours this week for nothing! Does the existence of counterfeit love mean that real love doesn’t exist? The recently dumped may think so, but I think generally we can agree that counterfeit love doesn’t disprove real love.
So, in conclusion, the non-existence of Thor has no bearing on the existence of Yahweh. The evidence for each must be weighed independently…
