I’ve Moved to Substack

Subscribe to my new home for writing here. I'm going to leave this blog up, warts and all. I don't stand by a lot of its contents, but hey, that just means there was growth, right? It would be fairly disturbing if years of reading, thinking, and listening to others hadn't changed my views in …

The Collapse of the Moral Argument

Today, we cast some doubt on the idea that morality is objective only if God exists. We define some crucial terms, refute a few apologetic canards, and discuss how apologists have misrepresented the field of metaethics and failed the audiences that rely on them. We also discuss the Euthyphro dilemma, Hume’s Law, and explore a …

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Rise of Political Conversions

Like many of you, I first encountered Ayaan Hirsi Ali through New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, both of whom were great admirers and enthusiastically promoted her work. Hitchens called her "the most important public intellectual probably ever to come out of Africa”. Watch on YouTube Ayaan Hirsi Ali has overcome more hardship …

AMA Responses

I recently asked for your questions, and I just posted my responses on YouTube here. We touch on compatibilism, NDEs, aliens, euthanasia, abortion, death anxiety as an atheist, idealism, incest, Islam, Mormonism, subjectivism, psychophysical harmony, and more.

Against Epiphenomenalism

Inspired by Matthew Adelstein’s post defending epiphenomenalism, I want to explain my opposition to the view. A few times, he referenced a podcast episode / blog post of mine from 2020, which I hadn’t read since it was first posted. I found a few things to disagree with in my own article, so I thought …

A Wittgensteinian View of Concepts

Understanding a concept is not a matter of knowing a definition. 

Alien Apologetics w/ Jimmy Akin

Wouldn’t aliens manage to avoid crashing their ships, given how advanced they’d have to be? Aren’t the distances between life-supporting planets too vast to feasibly travel? If figures in the government actually knew something, wouldn’t a cover-up involve too many people to keep the secret for long? I’m joined by Jimmy Akin to answer ten …

Encountering Mystery w/ Dr. Dale Allison

I recently sat down with Dr. Dale Allison, historian and author of many books, including The Resurrection of Jesus, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, and the subject of our conversation, Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age. The subtitle of the book notwithstanding, the unusual experiences we discuss are not explicitly religious. …

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”

I recently made a series about mistakes atheists make in epistemology. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” did not make that list because it’s not a mistake. Imagine thinking that extraordinary claims and ordinary claims incur the same exact evidential burden! Surely an extraordinary claim and an ordinary claim have different burdens of justification to meet in …

Debate: Limited vs. Unlimited God

LDS Philosophy and Dry Apologist joined me for a debate on the nature of God. We compare the virtues of a limited model of God versus a model on which God is unlimited in power, as well as simple, impassible, etc. Are the classical models of God too impersonal and abstract, incapable of sustaining a …