For some reason you keep trying to reduce my case for atheism to this article on the preposterousness of theism. That’s a strawman since even if you haven’t read many of my articles, you must know I’ve written a lot on Medium. My Medium homepage has a list of links to all of them. What you probably don’t know is that before I switched to Medium a couple of years ago, I wrote these kinds of articles on my blog, starting in 2011. I’ve collected them in several large anthologies on Amazon, so they amount to several thousand pages.
So again, when you launch into this flailing, baseless personal attack about my level of knowledge, it’s just water off a duck’s back. It has nothing to do with me. I’ve included some links below to where I talk specifically about various theistic arguments, namely the cosmological argument, the teleological one, the ontological one, the moral argument, presuppositionalism, neo-Thomism, the defense against the argument from evil, faith in miracles, and faith in scripture. There’s more I could include, and I’m not even going to get into the detail I’ve gone into in refuting Christianity in particular.
What you’re not understanding here is the role of this article on the preposterousness of exoteric (literalistic, anti-modern) theism. My point isn’t that there’s no need to respond to anything a theist says. Politeness alone would dictate a response, and I say explicitly in the article that there’s dirty work to do to clarify the situation since evidently there are still hundreds of millions of theists walking around.
My point here is an epistemic one. What I’m saying is that the atheist’s burden of proof is technically lessened by the prevailing modern context, which is to say that much of the atheist’s work has already been done long before the late-modern theist vs atheist debate even gets started. But I also say in the article that the atheist has no need to lean on this context. There’s no need to fear taking up an equal burden of proof against theism. It’s just that it would be a dereliction of philosophical duty not to notice that we live in secular, modern societies, not in totalitarian theocratic ones anymore.
Bizarrely, you also say the article strawmans Christianity by focussing on evangelical fundamentalism. You even say I “spend all my time” doing this. Where do I do that in the article? By talking about a physical resurrection of Jesus or about the basic contention of monotheism in Christianity and Islam, that God has a plan to rescue us from Hell, such as the Christian plan of having us trust in Jesus’s resurrection? It’s not just the most farfetched fundamentalists who believe that. Or are you talking about the example of dominionist theology? Anyway, do you think those few sentences out of the whole article justify your generalization? And you have the nerve to call me sloppy.
No, what’s fundamentally preposterous is theism, the view that a person created the universe and intervenes in nature in accordance with his plan to make us live forever and to punish us for our sins. Any religious practice based on those beliefs would be likewise outlandish.
My religion writings do focus on Christianity because most English-speaking readers are likely to be Christian or to live in nominally Christian areas. In any case, Christianity happens to be the world’s most appalling religion, so it’s the one that deserves the most criticism, followed by Islam. But I’ve also written on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, mysticism, New Age spirituality, and pantheism.
You also make much of this so-called equivocation between theism and religion. How does that undermine my point that both the religious beliefs and the practices are preposterous and anachronistic in the modern context? Again, the details don’t matter in this case. If you think they do, why don’t you spell out how that works?
Anytime you’d like to debate the existence of God with me, I invite you to use the contact form on my old blog and email me through that. We could have a friendly, substantive back and forth by email, which I would happily post on my Medium page. I’ve done this a few other times and I could provide Medium links to those exchanges, if you like. See the first link below and scroll down to just below the blogger profile on the right.
For the email contact form:
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/
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On theistic arguments:
