January 4, 2007

the_alchemist, who is an e-friend-of-a-friend, writes about The God Delusion, disagreeing with Dawkins’s argument that children should not be labeled with the religion of their parents. The discussion in the comments is interesting. I got involved in a thread about whether scientists are ignoring the god-shaped hole in human knowledge.

I’m also involved in another thread discussing religious language and whether the New Atheists are spouting off about fields they know nothing about. Pharyngula dismisses some of those sort of arguments as the Courtier’s Reply, but still, I’m interested in quite what the “non-literal” Christians are saying, and I don’t understand it yet.

Meanwhile, robhu has been listening to the sermons of Julian Hardyman, who preaches at the other big student church in Cambridge (the one I didn’t go to, because I was an Anglican). The three sermons robhu discusses are about the reliability of the Bible; science and religion; and atheism. Again, the comments are worth reading too.

I’ve now finished both Robin Lane Fox’s The Unauthorized Version and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, so I’ll post about those when I get round to it.