Vogt responds to Dillon:
Do Catholics Know Their Theology is Correct?: A Response
Not much here: theologians generally agree on the stuff that they would get marginalized, expelled or excommunicated (or in past centuries, executed) for disagreeing with; “natural theology” (as if people didn't read their preconceptions of God into what they find in nature); etc.
Well, that law about headline questions seems to be going strong:
Conveniently, the posts over the past week have been on a single topic, so I'll collect them together in one thread here:
The 100-Year Old Mistake About the Birth of Jesus
Jesus’ Birth and when Herod the Great *Really* Died
What Year Was Jesus Born? The Answer May Surprise You
Does Luke Contradict Himself on When Jesus Was Born?
The overall summary for these could be phrased as: “any secular source is invalidated by the slightest inconsistency, while any apparent inconsistencies in Christian sources must be explained, regardless of how improbable the source text or the explanation is”.
The fact is, as both secular and many Christian historians would agree, that even assuming Jesus did exist there is simply no reliable evidence for his birth year. The infancy narratives are late, ahistorical, and contradictory (both with each other and with external evidence); the earliest known writers who wrote on the subject are another century later and had no better sources to work from. The most reliable dating evidence is the association with Pilate (whose prefecture ran 26-36 AD), and the fact that Jesus is nowhere portrayed as notably young or old. This easily gives a window of at least 12 years around 1 BC as the likely range, with no strong reason to prefer any specific year over others.
Edited to add: almost all of Akin's claims are comprehensively rebutted in Carrier's article The Date of the Nativity in Luke. H/t to MichaelNewsham in the comments for the reminder.
I have no idea what schedule, if any, SN will be keeping over the holiday, but I have my own family commitments; so posts may be delayed. (Personally, I mark the winter holiday season as starting on the solstice and ending at perihelion...)
Today's post finishes up this series:
Today's post:
Does Evolution Contradict Genesis?
Very superficial, little more than a criticism of six-day creation interpretations of Genesis.
Monday again! Time for more Thomistic drivel:
Oh dear, looks like today is “frantically try and paper over the awkward bits in the Bible” day:
Do the “Infancy Narratives” of Matthew and Luke Contradict Each Other?
This one is so bad it could have come from AIG; Staples' tries to reconcile the question of where Joseph and Mary lived (Luke says Nazareth, with a visit to Bethlehem for the census; Matthew implies they lived at Bethlehem until forced to flee) by arguing that Matthew doesn't actually say that the house where the Magi visited Jesus was in Bethlehem rather than Nazareth. He chooses to ignore:
All in all it's absolutely clear that the author of GMatthew did not believe that Jesus and his family had been anywhere but Bethlehem before their flight. (It's also absolutely clear that he cares nothing about facts, since every single step in this story is explicitly stated to “fulfill what had been spoken” in various scraps of Jewish scripture.)
To claim as Staples does that the author of Matthew simply chose not to mention Nazareth earlier is to do violence to the text as written; a classic example of reading into a text something which is not there, with no justification.
Also, of course, this one point barely scratches the surface of the contradictions between Matthew and Luke, the contradictions between both and actual history, and the contradictions between Matthew and Luke's infancy stories and Mark's portrayal of Jesus' family.
Today's post:
Debunking One of the Worst Argument Against Atheism
While I encourage the idea of theists (or indeed atheists) criticizing the poor arguments of their own side, this particular effort is quite weak. Not because the argument is in fact strong, but because the criticism fails to expose its true weakness.
The argument in question is: in order to know that there is no God, you would have to know everything, i.e. be omniscient yourself.
The true flaw in this argument is this: it mistakes a universal claim for an existential claim. To know with certainty that no black swan exists, you would have to examine every swan in the universe; the negation of the existential claim "there exists a black swan" is the universal claim "all swans are not black". But no statement concerning an omni-attributed god can be simply existential; the claim "there exists an omni-present God" also means "for all places, God is present there" – a universal claim nested inside the existential one.
Accordingly, one does not need to survey the whole of spacetime to disprove an omni-present God; it suffices to show one single place which lacks a God (according to the theist's definition of God). Similarly, an omni-benevolent God is refuted by a single unnecessary evil.
Beaumont's argument is that we can refute the existential claim with logic, which is fine as far as it goes, but notice that this results in devaluing the significance of the evidence against God. Beaumont is obviously a Rationalist in the sense I attack in Against Rationalism; he apparently hasn't considered that we can have strong inductive evidence against the nested universal claim, even if we have no deductive proof of impossibility.
Belated link to yesterday's post:
What Racism Reveals About God and Man
As usual, there is no actual attempt to engage with secular concepts of ethics, just a brute denial that they exist. (Really need an even more disparaging tag than "drivel" for these kinds of posts.)
Today we have Feser plugging a new book:
Scholasticism vs. Scientism: An Interview with Dr. Edward Feser
Today's post:
The Absolute Uniqueness of Unconditioned Reality
Not sure of the authorship here? It's attributed to Brandon, but supposedly part of Karlo's series; I suspect some posting mistake.
This is a guest post; the views expressed are those of the contributor, and not of the site owner.
by Geena Safire
This is a fisking of Matthew Becklo's article at Catholic apologetics site Strange Notions, The Dying of the Brights, posted on 11/21/2014
The crowd, gathered to hear Richard Dawkins debate the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell...
Today's post:
Revisiting the Argument from Desire
More attempts to enshrine human cognitive flaws as somehow indicative of the structure of reality.
Today, an interview with an atheist commenter for a change:
Today's post is more metaphysical nonsense:
Today's post, a remarkably useless attempt at an interview by Vogt:
Would You Baptize Aliens? An Interview with Two Vatican Astronomers
Yadda yadda contingent yadda necessary yadda yadda Aquinas. Haven't we seen all of this before?
Inaccurate reporting in mainstream media shocker:
What the Media Got Wrong about Pope Francis and Evolution
Of course this all misses the point of what the real incompatibilities between evolution and Catholicism are: no teleology in nature, no Adam and Eve, no immutable human nature, "soul" as the Aristotelian form of the evolved human is not compatible with the "soul" which is individually specially created by God.
Today's post:
Do Atheists Believe in God After All?
A pretty silly study on the whole; the issues of small sample size and high variance have already been pointed out by PBR. Even Horn spots the methodological issue of not using a known-nonexistent deity or similar as a control (to which I'd add, they should also have considered using one from a culture foreign to the study participants).
A possibly more serious issue is the issue of conflation of "believe" and "have an emotional reaction to", the problem with which should be obvious.
Horn also demonstrates his ignorance of the nature of delusions (quoting the idiotic "poached egg" comparison). This is best answered with this piece from Scott Alexander.
Feser again:
Can We Know God’s Existence with Certainty?
That rule about questions in headlines seems to be holding up...
Today's post, on a topic I don't think we've seen raised before:
On the So-Called “Choice-in-Dying”
Naturally Horn presents a one-sided view of the issue, though.
Seems we recently passed both the 10,000'th comment and the 100,000'th pageview - milestones of no particular interest to those not committed to decimal arithmetic, but providing me with an excuse to make a new open thread :-)
Today's post:
Orwellian Analytics: Christians, Atheists, and Bad Statistics
There are legitimate criticisms of most social-psych research, but this article fails to exhibit any.
Today's post, another tedious retread (how many times have we had this one?) of the argument from contingency:
Today's post, which could have been better titled “Misunderstanding Occam's Razor for Fun and Profit”:
It’s That Simple: The First Cause and Occam’s Razor
Hint: declaring something to be simple does not make it so.
Today's post, in which Longenecker defends his position in the previous post:
Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?
His defense is of course hopeless, but I suppose he at least gets credit for trying.
“Silly arguments for God” day today, with the argument “Most people are religious, therefore God exists”.
*headdesk*
Historicity day! Today's article responds to Valerie Tarico's recent article, which is kind of odd because Tarico is a psychologist, not a historian, and if you want to argue honestly for historicity you should be arguing against the best case (currently Carrier's book), no?
Popular News Site Claims Jesus Never Existed
(Also, using Ehrman's pathetic and overcooked response as your counter-argument is lame.)
Since it looks like this subject would benefit from its own thread, here it is.
In the "everything requires a cause" thread especially, and also to some extent in other threads, there have been some rather egregious comments (many from Flynn, but he's far from the only offender) indicating complete ignorance of particle physics or nuclear physics. This post is for pointing them out in the comments, and supplying corrections (and/or appropriate mockery).
(Errors primarily caused by adherence to Aristotelian physics can go in the other thread.)
Given the boringness of other recent threads, I thought we might try an experiment.
The rules of this game are:
I'll probably do a few to kick off...
And today's post is another Feser article, desperately trying to save the cosmological argument:
Another stop on the Trasancos and Jaki World Tour:
Today's post, plumbing new depths of wrongness:
Today's post, another old recycled blogpost from Feser:
And this week's installment of the Trasancos and Jaki Show:
Next stop on Jaki and Trasancos' World Tour of Unscientific Places:
Thomism day today courtesy of Feser:
Today's post:
Richard Dawkins and the God of the Old Testament
As usual, the elephant in the room goes unremarked: the Old Testament (specifically the parts under discussion here) is not factual history but propaganda. Evolution may be harsh and amoral, but it really happened; we are the result of hundreds of millions of years of tooth-and-claw survival. But rather than deify evolution and worship its values, we have the option—some would say the only right option on meeting a god—of killing it and taking its powers for our own use.
The Old Testament God has no such excuse. The stories of genocides were almost certainly not told because they actually happened, but rather because the compilers of the OT regarded these genocidal commands as being consistent with the kind of god that they wanted; they embraced the idea of slaughter rather than rejecting it. (Archaeology gives us a history of the Levant which is completely at odds with the OT stories until sometime after the time of Solomon; we obviously can't prove that something didn't happen, but we can establish that the context of the genocide stories does not fit with the historical context of any plausible time at which they could have occurred.)
So what path to choose? Worship of a God whose supposedly inspired literature contains fictional atrocities, or look at the cold facts of evolution and say, “yes, this is where we came from, and we need to understand the legacy it has left us; but it no longer dictates our future”?
Today's post, the next installment of the Trasancos and Jaki show:
Today's post continues from the last one:
Today's post plumbs new lows, even for SN:
Can Atheists Defend Abortion Without Defending Infanticide?
I can defend abortion without defending infanticide using only four words: “bodily autonomy” and “Schelling fence”A Schelling fence is a highly salient stopping point on what might otherwise be a slippery slope. Even leaving aside the medical evidence that there is a step change in a newborn's level of consciousness at the point where they start to breathe air, there is the completely undeniable fact that after birth is the first point at which medical decisions can be made independently for mother and child (which is an important qualitative change). Then, the fact that this question is even being asked highlights the fact that birth—even more than ‘viability’—is the most salient point in the whole process of child development.
Today's post:
How Catholic Missionaries Brought Science to China
I think the only response to this is “so what?”
Today's post:
Why Everything Must Have a Reason for Its Existence
I think this one can be summed up as “don't try to learn Bayesian reasoning from William Lane Craig”.
I've added a page, which I hope to extend over time, of links to reference material which might be relevant or useful.
Any suggestions, comments, etc. can go here (I want to keep comments disabled on that page).
General questions and discussion involving the “New Apologetics” group can go here; the open thread is getting a bit cluttered.
Today's post:
Doubly drivel, since it engages a strawman materialism and responds to it with the usual pap about souls.
Today's post:
Demons, Playing Cards, and Telescopes
Heschmeyer does not seem to acknowledge that his initial point cuts both ways — being primed to believe in the existence of demons is actually even more analogous to having previously learned to associate the shapes and colours of playing cards.
By “Rationalism” in this article I mean the philosophical position, opposed to Empiricism and Skepticism, that knowledge can be acquired by reason alone, rather than from observation and experience (Empiricism) or not at all (Skepticism). To distinguish “Rationalism” from other terms (such as “rational”), I'll stick to capitalizing it.
If we take in our hand any volume—of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Today's post:
Second only to the concept of hell, I think the idea that we are somehow “fallen” or “broken” is one of the most pernicious of Christian beliefs.
Just finished a first reading of Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus.
The short summary is that I think the book succeeds in its goal of establishing what the case is that needs to be answered by the historicists; it presents a detailed Bayesian argument (and thereby avoids being sucked into the morass of dubious methodology) covering every category of evidence (not focusing solely on nitpicking over individual details in Paul or Josephus) and referencing its points in some detail (it's very footnote-heavy).
I do expect, unfortunately, that it'll get a lot of response that doesn't really respect the Bayesian logic but just points to isolated factors (such as the aforesaid individual details in Paul). The real test, though, will be whether it gets any useful responses from experts; for which I guess we'll have to wait and see. (It goes without saying that a large contingent of Christian apologists will reject the book without making any attempt to make valid arguments against it.)
Today's post:
Atheists More Motivated By Compassion Than The Faithful?
Old news about silly social-psychology experiment.
Today's post:
Quantum Physics and Bodily Resurrection
Plumbing new depths of idiocy in quantum theology.
Today's post:
Seven Proofs for the Natural Immortality of the Human Soul
"Proofs" they aren't. Also extra penalty points for using the disgusting exploitation of Antony Flew as an (irrelevant) jumping-off point for the article.
Today's post:
For all that this is from Paul Rimmer rather than one of the usual suspects, it still earns the drivel tag honestly.
Today's post:
Is Richard Dawkins Close to Christianity?
More confirmation of that law about questions in headlines.
Today's post:
An Atheist Historian Examines the Evidence for Jesus (Part 1 of 2)
I've been following a time-saving policy for the last 5 or so months of not bothering to read or engage significantly with historicist posts, because with Carrier's book completed (and due for publication this month), it is unlikely that any recent argument from the historicist side actually adds anything useful to the debate. Any arguments that might be valid would be better addressed after the book is out.
Today's post:
Blah blah ground of existence blah blah revelation blah blah.
Today's post:
Do ‘Religiously Knowledgeable’ Atheists Believe in God?
Short version: survey statistics are not worth much, especially in fringe small-N subcategories of larger surveys. (A proportion — sometimes a nontrivial one — of any survey sample are people giving a purely random or maliciously hostile response; for unpopular or socially marginalized beliefs this can easily skew the results. It has also been found that Americans overstate their religious observance and beliefs to pollsters.)
Today's post:
10 Atheists Who Engage Religion Charitably
More of the "good" vs. "bad" atheist drivel.
And today we have another video without transcript:
Faith and Unbelief: An Interview with Dr. Stephen Bullivant (Video)
Today's post is an especially pointless contribution (taken) from Feser:
What is an ad hominem fallacy?
Good content getting hard to find perhaps?
(Intended to be part 1 of a short series on contingency arguments)
Sketched out, the Argument from Contingency is along these lines:
Every step of this argument is open to serious criticism, but for the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on steps 5 and 6.
Today's post is from one of the more offensive bloggers in the Catholic blogiverse:
Today's post probably should be up for some sort of WTFtitle award:
Why It’s Okay to be Against Heresy and for Imposing One’s Will on Others
Today's post:
From Atheism to Catholicism: An Interview with Jennifer Fulwiler (Video)
Haven't watched the video myself. I almost never do in these cases; it takes ten times as long to convey the same amount of information as a transcript or text interview would, and I don't find it a worthwhile use of time.
Today's post is another anti-Ehrman round:
And the theist response to the previous post:
Today's post chooses an obvious theme, given the date:
The Five-Fold Argument for the Resurrection
Drivel from start to end; pretty much summed up by “if we uncritically assume the accuracy of the gospels and Acts, even the bits that textual critics tell us are interpolations (such as the bit about sweating blood), then it's obvious that the resurrection was real”. Duh.
Today's post:
Why Our Unique Solar System Points to God
Summary: junk astrophysics from someone with no apparent qualifications in the subject, whose source is Lee Strobel's garbage (and outdated) apologetics rather than real science.
This is a guest post; the views expressed are those of the contributor, and not of the site owner.
by Fr. Sean
David Hume was one of the most brilliant Scottish philosophers of the 18th century. Among his many works, he wrote a book entitled: An Enquiry into Human Understanding. In chapter ten of the book, he establishes a framework for entertaining the possibility of a miracle. If by chance you aren’t familiar with it, read part 1 and part 2; http://www.bartleby.com/37/3/14.html
Today's post:
Atheism, Philosophy, and Science: An Interview with Dr. Michael Ruse
Not much substance here, though he does reveal that most of the work on the Oxford Handbook of Atheism was actually done by his Catholic co-editor...
Today's post:
Was the Star of Bethlehem Real?: Responding to the Go-To Skeptic
Whose law is it about headlines? If the headline is a question, the answer is always "No."?
Today's post discusses the definition of the word "atheism". Yawn.
How Should We Define ‘Atheism’?
That said, I find Ruse (an arch-accomodationist atheist who also identifies as agnostic) and Bullivant (a Catholic) to be rather odd choices to edit the "Oxford Handbook of Atheism". Ruse has spent years engaging in unwarranted and unjustified attacks on other atheists (see for example Rosenhouse here and here or Coyne here). Anyone read the book or seen a useful review?
A thread for reviews, comments, recommendations etc. of books related to atheism or religion.
Today's post is Trent Horn's review of Peter Boghossian's book:
Today's post:
I guess this is more of the "wah, wah, materialism = meaninglessness" drivel, but I'm somewhat hampered by not actually having heard of the TV show in question.
Today's post is on the Testimonium Flavianum:
Today's post is very much in the "WTF is this doing here" category:
Periodically on SN the issue comes up of the “traditional” authorship and dating of the gospels, as opposed to the modern scholarly conclusions. The latest advocate of the traditional position is one “Irenaeus of New York” (one wonders what happened to the real-names policy), who endorses not only Matthean priority but also the idea that Matthew was originally written in a Semitic language (Hebrew or Aramaic).
So I thought a post reviewing the evidence and some resources would be useful.
Today's post:
Vatican II on Atheism: The Sources of Atheism
A better title might have been "How the Catholic Church completely fails to understand atheism".
Oh dear. Today we have a reprint of Flynn's ridiculous blogpost on Adam and Eve from some time ago, which has probably been linked over a dozen times from the SN comments:
From the Guardian Higher Ed., via Ophelia:
Teaching religion: my students are trying to run my course
The author is an anonymous atheist academic at a major UK university. Excerpt:
[At] my institution, the fee-paying culture has given rise to a predominantly white, economically-privileged, middle class student body, in which any diversity of religious or non-religious students has been overpowered by a particularly influential form of evangelical Christianity. It is a belief system that is uncomfortable with the academic study of religion, and which will often explicitly resist it.
Students' membership of this society is flattening the dynamics of lectures. Buying into the current claim that Christians suffer persecution in the UK, many appear compelled to resist the academic critique of the traditions and texts they hold dear. Recently, a group of students in a lecture refused to undertake the work set because they didn't want to apply postmodern perspectives to what for them was a sacred text.
A female colleague was accused of being "stupid" and "lacking authority" by those who believe a woman has no right to teach others about religious texts.
Other colleagues have been marked out as heretics in lectures. Of the students who remain outside this group – identifying as atheist, agnostic, Catholic or Jewish – a number have confided they feel intimidated or silenced by the louder, assertively evangelical students in the class.
Academic rigour, research-inspired teaching and independent, critical thinking are the hallmarks of today's university culture. And yet many of us have found ourselves diluting or softening the topics of our modules, and the intellectual and critical content of our lectures, for fear of poor student feedback (which is carefully monitored by the university). And to take account of the personal preferences of our evangelical students.
Today's post is the response to Paul Rimmer's:
Jason Rosenhouse (author of Among The Creationists, which I highly recommend), responded to Phil Plait's response to the Ham/Nye debate:
It’s Not Just Fundamentalist Religion That Has A Problem With Evolution
Rosenhouse's viewpoint is that evolution really is incompatible with many religious positions—not just the crazy Genesis-1-literalist ones espoused by Ham and the YECs, but much more. Key paragraphs:
So, after all, that, let us return to Plait’s argument. He tells us that the problem is too many people perceiving evolution as a threat to their religious beliefs. Indeed, but why do they perceive it that way? Is it a failure of messaging on the part of scientists? Is it because Richard Dawkins or P. Z. Myers make snide remarks about religion? No, those are not the reasons.
It is because these people have noticed all the same problems the scholars of Darwin’s time were writing about. It is because evolution really does conflict with their religious beliefs, but not because of an overly idiosyncratic interpretation of one part of the Bible. It is because the version of evolution that so worried the religious scholars of Darwin’s time, that of a savage, non-teleological process that produced humanity only as an afterthought, is precisely the version that has triumphed among modern scientists. And it is because the objections raised to that version of evolution in the nineteenth century have not lost any of their force today.
So I think the issue is just a tad more complex than Plait suggests. It manifestly is not the case that only the most narrow of fundamentalists has a problem with evolution. Evolution challenges the Bible, refutes the argument from design, exacerbates the problem of evil, and strongly challenges any notion that humanity plays a central role in creation. These are not small points, and Plait needs to acknowledge them.
(Do read the whole thing; quite a bit of it is Catholic-related)
Having bashed philosophy a bit, time for a slightly different viewpoint.
Dawkins (who should probably stay away from Twitter) tweeted:
Philosophers' historic failure to anticipate Darwin is a severe indictment of philosophy. Happy Darwin Day!
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 12, 2014I think there's a couple of things going on here. One is the historical trend which has separated "philosophy" from "science". Some philosophers, but only a few scientists that I've seen, seem to be fighting against this trend and trying to reclaim the position that science is a branch of philosophy.
While looking up the subject of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) I found this exchange of posts in 2012 between John Wilkins and Plantinga himself. But my interest was mainly in this form of Plantinga's argument:
The argument has at least two forms, one with a stronger conclusion and one with a weaker. [...] The weaker argument has the conclusion that one who accepts N&E has a defeater for any philosophical or metaphysical beliefs he has—beliefs such as that Plato was right (or wrong) about the forms, or that there is (or isn’t) such a thing as objective right and wrong, or that there is no such person as God, or (Darwin’s example) that “the Universe is not the result of chance”—or naturalism itself. These beliefs are of such a sort that it doesn’t seem to matter, for fitness, for survival and reproduction, whether you hold the belief.
For reasons which will become obvious, I won't discuss the validity of the argument. Instead, let's see where the possible conclusions take us:
(An original post by me for a change.)
For all the Catholic blog-verse's infatuation with Feser's work, in terms of his significance as a serious academic philosopher of religion Feser is pretty much nobody. The top dog in that particular kennel is generally considered to be Alvin Plantinga, who was just interviewed on the NYT's Opinionator blog by Gary Gutting under the title "Is Atheism Irrational?".
(No prizes for guessing Plantinga's answer to that one.)
Disqus apparently updated the "dashboard" page, and one thing I noticed is that you can now find your old posts on it even if they were deleted from the original discussion. (Though it only seems to go back about 3 months.)
It also shows when a post was marked as spam.
(I'm declaring this the new open thread, since the old one is getting a bit long.)
An old post from back in July, linked here by request:
This post is for discussing or objecting to the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics (including the standard model of particle physics).
On posts other than this one, it is acceptable to discuss the predictions or interpretations of relativity or QM to the extent that they bear on the original post under discussion, but it is not acceptable to raise new or unrelated objections to those theories anywhere other than in this single post. This will be enforced as stringently as required.
A post limit on this thread may be set in the future if it seems desirable to eliminate repetition.
Today's post descends into the "medical miracles" cesspit:
The Rational Judgment of a Miraculous Cure
(Number of amputees healed: 0)
By request, a list of some upcoming events of interest; feel free to mention more in the comments, and I'll add discussion pages for any of them on request or at my own whim.
Jan 31 - Feb 2: FTBConscience2 (free online conference; long list of speakers including Richard Carrier and Chana Messinger, both of whom contributed atheist articles to SN)
Feb 4: Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate
Feb 21: Carroll v. Craig debate
Moderation actions (other than those done with the permission of affected users) will be recorded here.
NOTE: This thread is for actions taken here on this site; to discuss events on the Strange Notions site, go to The "Strange Notions" Débâcle.
This is an older post (about 6 months) from SN, which I didn't comment on at the time since it was just after epeeist's banning:
Today's post is just the next part of the series:
The Road from Atheism: Dr. Edward Feser’s Conversion (Part 2 of 3)
So this is the place to argue about geocentrism and related topics.
Please do not mention the topic in any other post, even indirectly; this will be enforced by moderation or banning if need be.
Special Notice: This thread will be closed to commenting forever once the geocentrist posters have made 200 comments in it. This is for two reasons: one, to discourage pointlessly repetitive comments; and two, because by that time it will have degenerated into circularity.
Another recent article from before the purge:
How Contemporary Physics Points to God
I didn't comment on this one, but there were more than a hundred comments deleted.
The post immediately before the carnage was this one:
Does the Catholic Church Hate Women?
Almost half the comments on that post were deleted (note that the Disqus "this comment was deleted" only shows up where the deleted comment had responses - deleted comments without responses just don't show up at all).(Notably, one of the banned commenters was on the Catholic side, but accounted for only three posts, all of them absurd ad-hominem screeds.)
The post that, apparently, was where the carnage started:
The Opening of the Scientific Mind
This article was the latest of many attempts by the Catholic contributors to argue for pre-defined limits on science (a common demand from theists, as though without a proper fence, the ravening science-beast will trample over their territory).
I will repost here some of my more substantive comments, but they are mostly responses to other commenters rather than the article itself.
Today's article at Strange Notions is part 1 of a conversion story from philosopher (and notorious blowhard and quote-miner) Ed Feser:
The Road from Atheism: Dr. Edward Feser’s Conversion (Part 1 of 3)
So this here is a place to discuss the goings-on at Strange Notions; I've disqus-ified the comments for convenience.
If you're coming here from Strange Notions to continue a specific discussion, please find the "Estranged Notions" post corresponding to the one you were commenting on, and discuss there. If you've had comments deleted from SN then you can likewise repost those on the corresponding pages.
If the corresponding post isn't up yet or you have anything else to ask, do it on this post. General discussion about the incident, moderation policy, and so on can also be done here (if the comment count goes high enough I'll start another open thread).