Happy Birthday, Mark Twain

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes, and wishes he was certain.

-Mark Twain, Notebook, 1879

Why I am an Atheist^

I am an atheist because God called me to be a minister and then killed my mother with a car.

The Weird World of Leibniz's God

One of the things that gets trotted out when someone argues that faith and reason are compatible is that many contributions to science or philosophy have been made by individuals who were religious. If faith and reason are incompatible, it is claimed, how can so many scientists and philosophers in history have been Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or...). But this quick argument--some philosophers are Christians therefore Christianity is reasonable, Q.E.D.--moves a little too quickly. Instead we need to ask questions about what role the idea of God plays in some particular thinker's philosophical system to assess whether his faith can be seen as truly consistent with his intellectual contribution: is the idea of God required for the system to be coherent? That is, is God a fundamental concept? Is the idea of God consistent with the rest of the system, but superfluous? Is the idea of God inconsistent with it? Because if God isn't required for, or consistent with, the wider system of thought, then it might be that all we really learn about the relationship of faith to reason from a religious philosopher is that people are capable of operating in spite of quite a lot of cognitive dissonance. One way to proceed with investigating the supposed compatibility of faith and reason would be to look at  thinkers who were personally religious and see what role God plays in their systems. What kind of world do we get if we start with the assumption that God exists and work from there? In this post, I'll look at the very bizarre but apparently internally consistent system that Leibniz built on some standard assumptions about God.

RIP Earl Scruggs

Happy Birthday, Daniel Dennett

Almost no one is indifferent to Darwin, and no one should be. The Darwinian theory is a scientific theory, and a great one, but that is not all it is. The creationists who oppose it so bitterly are right about one thing: Darwin's dangerous idea cuts much deeper into the fabric of our most fundamental beliefs than many of its sophisticated apologists have yet admitted, even to themselves.

--Daniel Dennet, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

Happy Birthday, Richard Dawkins

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006)

Happy St. Patrick's Day, drunks!

Great Lakes Conway's Irish Ale

Bottle, poured into a pint glass

Appearance-- Nice amber color; thin foam but decent retention
Smell-- Not much to it. A little sweet and a little grainy but not much else.
Taste-- Smooth and sweet, nice crispness in the finish. Solid.
Mouthfeel-- Not bad. A little over carbonated

Overall-- Decent and drinkable; better than Killian's. A-

Happy Birthday, Einstein

I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

--Albert Einstein, The World as I See It