Keith Parsons's Blog, page 70

Twisted Script

Well-known novelist Richard Hoyt has written Twisted Script, a novel that satirizes both Evangelicalism and Islam. Apparently he's had trouble getting it published through conventional means. (Surprise, surprise.) So he's making it available very cheaply online. If anyone is interested, take a look.

A secular atheist country dominated by radical Islamists

Apparently, probable US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich just declared that
"I have two grandchildren: Maggie is 11; Robert is 9," Gingrich said at Cornerstone Church here. "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no

Swinburne's Case for God - Part 10

1. Don't Criticize what you don't understand. I have been following this principle in my approach to Richard Swinburne. For more than a year now I have studied his case for God in The Coherence of Theism and The Existence of God. As an atheist the objective of finding significant problems in his case for theism is of interest to me, so that I can refute his case as part of a defense of my own

"The Evolution of Religion"

I highly recommend a review article by Scott Atran and Joseph Heinrich, "The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions." It's a great summary of current thinking about scientific explanations of religion. (Thanks to Konrad Talmont-Kaminski)

Sample quotation:
In sum,

C.S. Lewis Pontificates about Something or Other

Victor Reppert has recently posted this quote from C.S. Lewis on his Dangerous Idea blog: "The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple. We can observe a single one-way progression. At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life, and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph

Existentialist textbook sticker

Voas paper

I just got back from Belgium, where I was on the PhD defense committee of Maarten Boudry, a philosopher interested in science and pseudoscience and science and religion issues. He's already done some really good work and he put together an excellent thesis. I hope those of us interested in such matters will be hearing a lot more from him in the future.

Also on the committee was Konrad

Guessoum interview

Stuart Elliot pointed me to an interesting interview with Nidhal Guessoum online, concerning Islam and science.

I met Guessoum last month at the AAAS meeting. Interestingly, I was responding to a question after my talk, and I gave Guessoum as an example. He turned out to be in the audience. (I had not met him in person before.)

Anyway, Guessoum adopts about as liberal an Islam as you can get

The "Inner Testimony" of the Holy Spirit

I forget whether I have posted this before. If so, pardon the redundancy.Having had on two occasions the privilege of debating Prof. William Lane Craig, I found the experiences both exhilarating and frustrating. One point of frustration was that Prof. Craig often appeals to the "inner testimony" of the Holy Spirit as trumping any evidence or argument that could be adduced. Naturally, this made

Victor Reppert on Christianity and Science

Victor Reppert posted the following remarks on his Dangerous Idea blog relating to the topic of Christianity and the development of science: "A couple of things off the top of my head. First, the major advances of modern science, when it became clear that science could really make a difference not only in the way we view the world, but also the way in which we live our lives, happened in