I’m not entirely happy with the rise of the “nones”

Over the past decades in the United States, there has been a rise in the number of people claiming no religious affiliation, or “nones.” While this includes atheists and agnostics, these individuals are often distinguished from those who actively identify as such. “Nones” may be agnostic or atheist, but most have a theistic or deistic…

A response to Faithroots apologetics

Faithroots is a blog about theology and apologetics that posted “God in the dock: objections to his greatness and goodness (part 2)”. The post covers several arguments for and against the existence of God. It’s interesting to me for a couple reasons. For one, it appears to be a good faith effort to present the…

Medium-strength atheism

Atheism is sometimes divided into weak and strong forms. Weak atheism can be described as an absence of belief in any god, while strong atheism positively affirms a belief that there is no god. This is related to the distinction between agnostic and gnostic atheism, where agnostic atheism claims no knowledge about the existence of…

Gnostic apatheism

There is a common model of belief about god that places a person’s belief on a 2D plane with one axis for belief and another axis for knowledge. The vertical axis represents degree of belief in the existence of god. The horizontal axis represents the degree to which one claims to know that their belief…

Failure to understand the null hypothesis

This is an issue I see a lot in apologetics and in arguments about theism vs. atheism. Certain theists (who I will just refer to as “theists,” even though I’m not referring to all theists) want to be able to put forward the existence of god as a hypothesis that can be argued for or…

The decline and fall of young earth creationism

For most of human history, the age of the earth was unknown. Many believed it was created at some point in the past by supernatural forces, and others hypothesized that the earth always existed. Within the Abrahamic tradition, genealogical lists have been used to trace back to Adam and the date of creation as described…