My Infidels paper on Miracles.

 Here. 

Things science can't answer

 

Are there some things science can’t answer in virtue of the fact that it deliberately limits its domain. I don’t know of a scientist who can answer scientifically the question of why something exists rather than nothing. But we can ask the question, and it has some answer.

The aliens want to serve man. But are they benevolent?

 Here. 

Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship, and C. S. Lewis's response

 Here.  

Lewis said it was what  he at one time believed. 

However, he concluded (before his conversion) that: 

In his “Worship of a Free Man” I found a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty – that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole. The Promethean attitude would be tenable only if we were really members of some other whole outside the real whole: [which] we’re not.24,25 L

If evil is the problem, physicalism is not the solution

 What is the alternative to believing in God. Is it believing that the physical world is all there is? The argument from evil, while raising difficulties for the goodness of God, also raises three difficulties for physicalism. 

1) In order for the argument from evil to work, people have to be able to reason. We have to be aware of logical connections, and these logical connections, as opposed to prior physical states, have to cause states of our brain to occur. C. S. Lewis and others (including me) have argued that this is a serious difficulty for the view that the physical world is all there is. If evil refutes theism, could we ever know this if physicalism is true? 

2) In order for the argument from evil to work, there have to be conscious states. But if they physical world is all there is, this is a hard problem. Pain is a problem only if there is real pain, not just the firing of C-fibers. 

3) In order for the argument from evil to work, there either have to be moral facts, or consensus amongst theists as to what God must do if he is good. If there are moral facts, this is a hard problem for physicalism. The argument contends that if God exists, and is perfectly good, then God will not allow unnecessary suffering. Sometimes atheistic ethical subjectivists will argue that this is not a problem for the argument from evil, since this is an internal difficulty for, let us say, Christian theism. But is it guaranteed that all Christians will believe that God, if he exists, won't allow unnecessary suffering? I don't think so. 

Now there may be other alternatives to theism that just physicalism. But it seems to me that if evil and suffering is the problem, physicalism is not the answer. 

On replacing pain

 Doctors have actually tried to replace pain in the human body with some other kind of warning system. It doesn't work. The philosopher David Hume said that God could have given us something less unpleasant than pain in order to warn us the way pain does but is less unpleasant. I remember talking to someone who did pain research but who was going into philosophy, and he told me that the work of pain can't be done without the awfulness of pain. 

The problem of evil--with some references to Calvinism

 If God is good, why is there so much evil? Or any evil at all? This is, without doubt, the most powerful argument for atheism. Those who don't accept this argument for atheism have, it seems to me, three strategies. 

One strategy is to explain evil. A typical explanation for evil is to explain it in terms of free will. The idea is this. An obedience that is caused by God isn't real obedience, it is the obedience of a robot. God wants real love and real obedience, which entails the possibilty of non-love and disobedience. If God opens the possibility of disobedicence, then bad consequences are bound to result when creatures violate his will. And there are other explanations. Things that appear bad to us at first turn out, on further examination, not to be so bad after all, or perhaps, better than the hoped for alternative once the consequences of that alternative are more fully examined. Tough practices lead to good performances on the football field, for example. Suffering is at ;least sometimes good for us and is redemnptive. These are what I call explanatory responses to the problem of evil. The defender of theism explains why God permits the evil. 

However, atheists have responded to these explanatory responses in various ways. They have argued that God didn't have to allow sin, all God has to to to provide us with free will is to make us in such a way that we always desire to do what is right, and then empower them to fulfil those desires. This goes to a debate about what is meant by free will. Incompatibilists think that for us to have free will our actions have to not be determined by God (or the laws of nature), while compatibilists maintain that nature or evein God can determine our actions, and our actions will still be free. And, while some religious believers think that God limits his control over events in order to allow free will, others maintain that God strictly controls everything. For example, many Calvinists believe that God controls all of our actions, and predestines some people to heaven and others to hell. 

And there are certainly evils which don't seem to fit in with the free will response, since they are not the result of choice. Natural evils don't come from free will. Consider two disasters in the Gulf of Mexico: the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, and Hurricane Katrina. Humans are arguably responsible for the oil spill, but we didn't cause the hurricane. So, why did God set up the world in such a way that natural disasters kill thousands of people and ruin the lives of even more people? And thjen there are what I call problems for "special victims"--the suffering of small children and the suffering of animals. These sufferers. surely, have not done wrong in order to suffer, yet they suffer nevetheless. Why does God permit this?

Defenders of theism, it seems to me, have to respond by saying that we can't expect to know the reason God permits at least a significant amount of suffering.

God knows all the alternatives, and their consequences, and chooses the course of action he does based on a greater knowledge and awareness of the results than we could possibly have. Given our finitude and God's infinite knoweldge, our level of  understanding of God's purposes for suffering is about what we should expect. 

But there is, I contend, a third type of response, I have been assuming here that if God is good, God will maximize, as far as possible, happiness for his creatures. But some people believe, as I indicated earlier, that God predestined some to heaven and other to hell. Why not save everyone? If you think God has to give us free will which limits his contol then people could end up in permanent rebellion and therefore permanently separated from God, but if God predestines everything, then his control is not self-limited. What Calvinists contend is that what makes God's actions good is not the happiness of creatures but glory for God himself, and that is achieved best through exercising both his mercy for some sinners and justice for others. But this calls into question not only our knowledge of outcomes, it challenges certain common-sense ideas of what is and is not morally good. 

So, theists can respond to suffering by a) explaining it b) being skeptical or our knowledge of the results of possible divine actions or c) being skeptical of our knowledge of what constitutes goodness when it comes to divine actions. 

Spiritual reality

A spiritual reality is something that is not material or physical. It is possible to hold that people who have religious experiences perceive something nonmaterial, but not something along the lines of a personal creator God that, for example, Christians worship. Advaita Vedanta Hinduism or British Absolute Idealism would be views like that. While Christians typically think there is a real material world, it was created by someone and we have souls which interact with the material world. But there is a real material world. But other views collapse the distinction between the world and God and maintain that Ultimate reality is somehow mental but not personal. On these views traditional theism and materialism are both false.