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on March 11, 2017

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I present BELIEVING BULLSHIT at Oxford Literary festival Fri 31st march at 12.00 Tickets available here.

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Three key points to make when debating the existence of God

Three key points to make when debating the existence of God.
1. Defining God
First, in asking: Does God exist? It would be good to get some clarity about which God we are talking about.
I shall assume we are talking about a God that is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good:
Prof William Lane Craig defines God as a 'maximally great being' - which he says requires that God be morally perfect.
Prof Richard Swinburne similarly characterises God as 'a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good'.

It suffices to establish atheism, then (given these guys' characterisations/definitions of theism), that I show beyond reasonable doubt that there's no being that is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good.

What is Humanism?

What is Humanism?
“Humanism” is a word that has had and continues to have a number of meanings. The focus here is on kind of atheistic world-view espoused by those who organize and campaign under that banner in the UK and abroad.
We should acknowledge that there remain other uses of term. In one of the loosest senses of the expression, a “Humanist” is someone whose world-view gives special importance to human concerns, values and dignity. If that is what a Humanist is, then of course most of us qualify as Humanists, including many religious theists. But the fact remains that, around the world, those who organize under the label “Humanism” tend to sign up to a narrower, atheistic view.
What does Humanism, understood in this narrower way, involve? The boundaries of the concept remain somewhat vague and ambiguous. However, most of those who organize under the banner of Humanism would accept the following minimal seven-point characterization of their world-view.

'But it's the best explanation!' - how bullshit beliefs are justified

Folk who believe in fairies, or miracles, or alien visitation, are generally fond of an argument called ARGUMENT TO THE BEST EXPLANATION.
Here's an example of argument to the best explanation (or abduction, as it's sometimes known): I see shoes poking out from under the curtain and the curtain twitching slightly above them. I can also hear breathing. I infer there's someone standing behind the curtain. Why? Because that's the best available explanation of what I observe. True enough, the twitching might be caused by the breeze from an open window and the shoes were just coincidentally placed in the same spot. But I reckon that's a bit less likely than that there's someone standing there (for what explains the breathing noise?) Quite what makes an explanation the 'best' is controversial, but there's some agreement that the simpler and more elegant an explanation, the better. So, for example, I could explain that twitching curtain by supposing tha…

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