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God’s Not Dead
I decided to witness the car-crash that I’ve been assured that God’s Not Dead is, first-hand, so in order to maintain some semblance of sanity, I posted tweets fairly frequently during the movie. And stopped it a lot to go do something else, lest the overload of ignorance do long-term damage. It took probably about…
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The Dishonesty of Intelligent Design
I’ve written a number of posts on the problems of Intelligent Design, and how it’s merely a cover for Creationism, but the problems go deeper than that. Functionally, its proponents pretend that they have ‘nothing in particular’ in mind when they argue for a designer, and under that cover, they attempt to shoe-horn Creationism into…
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Failed Replications and “Emptiness”
Recently, a Jason Mitchell of no less than Harvard University published a piece of writing entitled “On the emptiness of failed replications“, within which Mitchell decries the focus on replications within Social Psychology, and (to, I hope, a lesser degree) within science as a whole. I found it an interesting read, and an excellent example of…
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Langara College and the Bullshit it Peddles
When I first came to Vancouver from Ireland, I found out about the student loan program that was available in Canada and discovered that I could actually afford to go to University. I’d just missed the enrollment deadline for the University of British Columbia, but a helpful advisor there suggested a number of avenues I…
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Rhetoric and Context
How we argue with people sends signals to those around us. We are socially signalling the kind of person we are, and giving them cues as to whether or not they want to engage with us. This is, I think, an important point in rhetoric and persuasion, and can determine how we approach an argument. We…
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Unpaid Internships Need to Go
As the job market becomes more and more competitive (i.e. there are more and more people in the world), people in the recruiting world seek quick and easy ways to distinguish candidates from one another. If you’ve got a stack of 500 resumes in front of you, and the bulk are simply people who have…
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A “Personal Relationship” with Jesus
I’d like to go back to the most excellent example of terrible writing, 7 Things That Prove God Is Real, to focus on the last two points that the author (J. Lee Grady) makes. I want to focus on them as they appear to be pretty common within the arguments for [insert religion here], and they’re…
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A Short Overview of Free Will
Last night, I gave a short presentation on Free Will in order to kick off some discussion between mixed groups of atheists and theists. It went quite well, I feel, and the discussions that I was involved with went pretty well. The notes I used are included below. It’s a really just a rough overview,…
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Free Will: Illusion or Real? A Theist and Atheist View
I will be presenting one half of a discussion on Free Will tomorrow evening (in Vancouver, BC, for non-local readers). I (and the other presenter) will be giving a short 15-min introduction to the topic, and then everyone will be breaking up into smaller discussion groups. If you’re interested in having positive (I hope) discussions…
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Brute Facts are not Reasons
Unlike a lot of my friends, I don’t find articles written by Christians to be completely stupid, or ignorant, or “unscientific”. The problems with them are those of basic reasoning, and this problems are not limited to Christians. In any case, I find them to be extremely useful to explaining reasoning, and how to articulate arguments,…
