Introduction to The Freed Thinker – First Edition

First impressions matter. As this is my first post to this forum I had considered a short introduction but saw the oozing narcissism that such a post might expose and therefore decided for a slightly different route – faux humility perhaps.  Instead of laying myself bare on the plate, I will present a brief excursion into projects that I am currently working my way through. This is to pique your interest in my further posts and drive foot traffic toward my too often neglected blog (logical-theism.blogspot.com) and red-headed spin off of a podcast (The Freed Thinker Podcast) in order to encourage me to update them with more frequency (read: “make me feel horribly ashamed should I overlook it for too long for the toils and joys of daily life so that I force myself to lose nights of sleep and live on nothing but fruit roll ups and coffee just to get some posts and episodes up”).

Project 1 – Published book review of Atheist popularizer David McAfee’s 2^nd edition of  Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings. In this project David has agreed to republish his 2^nd addition with my revised full book length review of his book (even though it is quite scathing, though I hope charitable). The first draft of this review has been completed and is now in the editing stages and will hopefully be on Amazon by Christmas (shameless plug to encourage you to put it on your list for Santa). This book as in anticipation of the one that David and I are writing together.

Project 2 – David and I are also writing a discussion book between an atheist and a theist where we each attempt to answer the same 25 questions. These range from questions about worldviews, logic, morality, the Bible, science and faith, God, and a whole host of others. My first draft for this book is nearly completed and then will enter the editing phase. We can hope to see this on Amazon by early to middle of next year (for those birthdays in the first half of 2013).

Project 3/4 – As I stated above I am currently working on logical-theism.blogspot.com as well as The Freed Thinker Podcast. I hope to post more articles and episodes soon enough. The blog will pick up on a continued series that I have on whether or not Jesus did predict his own return in the life time of the first disciples and the podcast is currently in the final stages of examining the Kalam Cosmological argument and why I think that it is not, strictly speaking, a theistic proof but can be quite easily, and should be, affirmed by atheists everywhere.

Project 5 – I am on the planning stages of a book that I am tentatively entitling Illusions of Atheism: The Ironies of Unbelief. Through my many years of debating atheists, skeptics, anti-theists all ranging from sensitive and considerate thinkers to the wildly vitriolic anti-theistic fundamentalists (who are almost more often anti-intellectual and anti-reason than their evangelical counterparts) I have noticed several ironic applications of many of their presuppositions, beliefs, and pragmatic applications. Here are just some of the examples (some seem to be true of the naturalistic worldviews, others are responses to specific but common atheistic objections and may not be generally applicable but will be common enough):

1. That morality is evolved and socially constructed…. But religion is really and objectively evil (especially that YHWH character) and we really ought to reject it.
2. Morality is not real or objective – but we are justified to act like it is. (And yet Christians are deluded… Christians may be wrong, but which is worse? Believing X and being wrong, or believing X is false but acting as if it were true anyway and demanding that others do as well – I call it nihilistic moral imperialism.)
3. Science can answer every question… accept why we should trust our senses, believe the laws of nature are consistent, that anything will hold true in the future or that we are not brains in vats.
4. Science functions on logical laws of causation and induction… but we know that the whole universe itself came about completely uncaused out of nothing and by nothing under no causal conditions (often only asserted when the Kalam is lurking in the background.)
5. We must only believe what we observe by evidence… but to explain away fine tuning we will postulate a nearly infinite number of unobservable, unknowable, untestable mutliverses to try and fix the odds of a divine foot in the door.
6. In order to reject the Kalam we can posit an infinite multiverse – but reject that a “designed” universe would surely be one of many possible universe. (Notice that in an infinite set any possible permutation will occur an infinite number of times and so a universe designed by a universe designer would exist an infinite number of times – so why should it be improbable that we observe a designed universe?)
7. In every single real life example of specified and complex information we always know someone intelligent is behind it… but when we observe it in nature a pox on anyone who would say that it is by intelligence too because we know that it might possibly (in one of those nearly infinite unknowable universes) come about by unseeing, unguided, unintelligent natural causes despite not having a single counter example to show it. When all else fails a just-so-story shrouding in mocking dissent will usually do the trick for fellow anti-atheistic banner wavers.
8. Science can only give naturalistic answers because nature is all there is and thus naturalistic answers are the only acceptable ones.
9. Theists always beg the question in their arguments for God. But God cannot exist because there is no evidence that God exists… and there cannot be evidence for God because nothing exists beyond the natural world.

These are just several of the ironic applications of naturalism in general or unique atheistic positions in specific that will be covered in the book.

Project 6 – I am a regular “contributor” (more like only 1 of 2 theists in the group) on The Skeptics Testament Podcast Facebook forum as well as The Secular Writings of David McAfee Facebook forum. To see the discussion that haunt those walls hop on over and lend me a hand.

That should suffice for now to garner some interest for my sites (and some patience for possible extended absences from the threads) and give you a peek into the daily grind that is my life. Plus more than full time work, graduate studies, being present for my beautiful wife and trying to find time to eat and sleep and play with my cat. This is the life.