How is belief in God any different from Flying Spaghetti Monsterism?
Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (also known as Pastafarianism) is a “religion” created by a man named Bobby Henderson. Mr. Henderson created this satire in protest of the Kansas State Board of Education’s decision to teach intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution. In essence, he was asking, “If foolish religious ideas like that…
Is belief in God nothing but wish fulfillment?
In his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud called the hopes offered by religion “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind. . . . We disregard its relation to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification” (pp. 21, 31). In other words, Freud…
What is the Spider-Man fallacy?
The Spider-Man fallacy is a mistake in logic that some skeptics falsely accuse Christians of making. The Spider-Man fallacy is explained like this: in the future, archaeologists find old Spider-Man comic books, and within those comics are certain facts that are true (such as New York being an actual city). Based on that historical evidence,…
Does the “God gene” disprove God?
Dean Hamer’s 2004 book, The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes, in no way disproves God. Hamer’s theory – that the VMAT2 gene in humans is responsible for producing a belief in God – has been widely criticized both in secular scientific circles and in the theological world. There is virtually no…