CADRE Comments

I've been doing a series on Greta Christina's laughably bad reasons why we shouldn't believe in God. In my most recent post I examined her claim that all religious arguments are 'ridiculously weak', and noted that she linked to certain posts on her own blog where she examines some of those arguments in more detail. I'm going to take a break from the regular series and look at some of these, starting with her post on fine-tuning. Things are not off to a promising start with her description of the fine-tuning argument: The Universe is perfectly fine-tuned to allow life to come into being. The distance of the Earth from the Sun, the substance and depth of the atmosphere, the orbit of the Moon, the nature of matter and energy, the very laws of physics themselves… all are perfectly tuned to let life happen. If any of them had been different by even a small amount, there could not have been life on Earth. And the odds against this fine-tuning are astronomical ....

We continue our examination of Greta Christina's list of the top ten reasons not to believe in God. In the first post we looked at her claim that history shows a pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones in the explanation of events (spoiler alert: it doesn't). In the second post we looked at her claim that, because the world religions disagree about the nature of the divine, we are just making this religion stuff up. The next reason Christina offers for not believing in God is that all the arguments offered for the existence of God are "ridiculously weak".  A bold claim, and one Christina comes nowhere near substantiating. First of all, the comment I made about the fundamental flaw running through Christina's whole piece in the first post needs to be repeated: "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 ...

In the previous post I began responding to the list of reasons Greta Christina has given for not believing in God. We saw that the first reason, the alleged consistent pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones is flawed because on classical theism there can be no conflict in principle between religious and physical explanations, and because disputes between naturalism and theism boil down to the question of what types of agents exist in the world, and the evidence there must be judged case by case, for which the progress of science is irrelevant. The next reason Christina gives is the inconsistency among the world's religions regarding what God or ultimate reality is like: If God (or any other metaphysical being or beings) were real, and people were really perceiving him/ her/ it/ them, why do these perceptions differ so wildly?  When different people look at, say, a tree, we more or less agree about what we're looking at: what size it is, what shape, w...