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Showing posts from March, 2012

Ten (bad) reasons not to believe in God, part 1

Someone named Greta Christina has put together a list of the top ten reasons why she doesn't believe in God. They are bad reasons, and have been repeatedly refuted, but responding to a recent regurgitation of them will give me the chance to clarify some misconceptions and consolidate my own current thinking about these issues. Before I examine each individual reason, I should point out a severe flaw at the heart of Christina's discussion: her definition of God is so all-encompassing (at one point she says that by 'God' she includes "the soul, or metaphysical energy, or any sort of supernatural being or substance") that her arguments, far from relentlessly picking apart one well-defined hypothesis, at best strike glancing blows at a dozen different and sometimes incompatible views. An argument against substance dualism when it comes to explaining human consciousness, for example, has no implications for the existence of God as conceived by the monotheistic r