Free Republic

Three major discoveries during the last century contradict the forecasts of scientific atheists, pointing instead in a distinctly theistic direction.This week, traditional Jews and Christians celebrate special acts of God in human history. Yet, polling data now show that an increasing number of young people, including those from religious homes, doubt even the existence of God.Moreover, polls probing such young “religiously unaffiliated agnostics and atheists” have found that science — or at least the claims of putative spokesmen for science — have played an outsized sole in cementing disaffection with religious belief. In one, more than two-thirds of self-described atheists,...

In Hebrews 11:1 in the Bible, faith is described as the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Now, according to a new study by Georgetown University neuroscientists, the strength of one's faith in God is likely linked to the brain.In their study, Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan, published this month in the journal Nature Communications, the neuroscientists found that an individual’s ability to unconsciously predict complex patterns, through an ability known as implicit pattern learning, had a strong correlation with the strength of their...

In my previous article, I originally defined atheism as “the rejection of the possibility that ‘God’ exists” because that is how I’ve understood the word from the time I spent studying theodicy (God and the problem of evil). But many “atheist” commenters disagreed with this definition because their self-designation was based on belief statements that didn’t align with my knowledge statement. This article explains the differences between the viewpoints and the logic behind them. Atheism is commonly called the belief that there aren’t any gods or the lack of belief in gods. But in a more accurate, philosophical sense, it...

June 8, 2017 Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People? by Dr Jerry Bergman In a recent article at Live Science, Laura Geggel asks, “Why Are Atheists Generally Smarter Than Religious People?” She claims that “For more than a millennium, scholars have noticed a curious correlation: Atheists tend to be more intelligent than religious people.”[i] How they could know this, since IQ tests and other means of measuring intelligence were only developed at the start of the last century, was not answered. Another problem is many kinds of intelligence exist, such as doing well on paper and pencil tests, or...

One of the survivors, a guy named Alamo told the press "My first thought was, 'Oh my God, I'm going to die," Alamo said, his voice very quiet. "I was praying to God that I would live to see another day. I couldn't believe this was happening."

Have you ever heard the claim "all smart people are atheists", or maybe its inverse: "people who believe in God are dumb"? It's quite a pervasive urban legend, and one which I've known is false for a long time, but I didn't realize just how false until the other day. I recently decided to do a quick cataloging of the ten highest IQ's on earth, and discovered that it's nearly the exact opposite of the truth! Before reading the list, however, I want to remind you of the caveat that IQ test results are not in any sense the measure...

Part 1 in a new series examining the common fallacies committed by both statists and theists. This video covers the fact that both atheism and libertarianism are both negative philosophies, and therefore the burden of proof is on statists and theists ...

The last few years have seen several books championing agnosticism or atheism making their way into the popular press. These books leave most informed readers quite baffled, because they ignore the vast majority (if not the entirety) of the considerable evidence for theism provided by physics and philosophy during the last few decades. This evidence is capable of grounding reasonable and responsible belief in a super-intelligent, transcendent, creative power that stands at the origins of our universe or any hypothetically postulated multiverse. The main purpose of this book is to give a brief synopsis of this evidence to readers who...

1. Discuss the Fermi Paradox. Atheists love aliens because they always assume that, a) brainy creatures gushing out of every galactic cranny shows that Earth is low-rent cosmic real estate, and b) the smartest aliens will be atheists. Against this giddy optimism, the famous physicist Enrico Fermi asked a quite innocent question: If Earth is a typical planet, and there are lots of planets in the universe, then why haven’t any extraterrestrial critters dropped by, or even sent us a text message (“ur nt solo, n btw ur nt vry smrt”)? 2. Join Mensa. Atheists are obsessed with their IQs...

Those who worry about a balance on the Supreme Court of adherents to Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Protestant Christianity and other religions are concerned about the wrong categories. There are two salient classes of religions - theistic religions and atheistic religions. If we define a religion as a system of beliefs, atheism is just as much a religion as theism is. The religious balance that should most concern us as we assess the composition of our courts is the degree to which our jurists seek to push theistic religions off of the public stage, inviting atheistic religions to take their place....

One of the Bible's great statements about courage comes in chapter 5 of Esther. The Jewish queen of Persia has told Uncle Mordecai that she can't go before the king: If she does, she'll probably die. Mordecai responds with admonition—you won't escape by hiding—and then a line that has sent chills down my spine: "Who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?" For such a time as this.In every generation moments of truth arise. Esther, early Christian martyrs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and many more throughout the centuries have faced life-or-death decisions. In this...

CHICAGO — Research suggests that religious belief can help protect against symptoms of depression, but a study at Rush University Medical Center goes one step further. In patients diagnosed with clinical depression, belief in a concerned God can improve response to medical treatment, according to a paper in the Journal of Clinical Psychology. A total of 136 adults diagnosed with major depression or bipolar depression at inpatient and outpatient psychiatric care facilities in Chicago participated in the study. The patients were surveyed shortly after admission for treatment and eight weeks later, using the Beck Depression Inventory, the Beck Hopelessness Scale,...

The ideal of the coolly rational scientific observer, completely independent, free of all preconceived theories, prior philosophical, ethical and religious commitments, doing investigations and coming to dispassionate, unbiased conclusions that constitute truth, is nowadays regarded by serious philosophers of science (and, indeed, most scientists) as a simplistic myth...

Within less than 20 years, theistic religion will become the developed world's primary organizing and motivating force — not through orderly growth, but suddenly and by default, as today's wrongheaded social patterns and perspectives become untenable. Atheism in particular is about to fall victim to its own errors, while Roman Catholicism is uniquely positioned to gain tremendous stature. Historians may one day refer to this event as the "Theistic Revolution." .... The resulting "baby bust" is about to destabilize nations, because the most self-sufficient members of society are not replacing themselves with similarly capable citizens who can support pension programs...

David Hume was a Scottish philospoher well known for his attack on the principle of causality - the principle that nothing can occur or exist without a cause. He believed that although one event (set of impressions) always preceded another, this did not prove that the first event caused the second. The constant conjunction of two events, he said, built up the expectation that the second event would take place after the first. But this was nothing more than a strong belief or habit of mind taught by experience. One could never prove that there were causal connections among impressions....

C.S. Lewis, the former atheist and famous Oxford scholar, once said "Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...." There are a myriad of eminent scholars (like Lewis) who understand the folly of atheism. I will list a few others in this second part of my treatise to expose atheists' agenda to ban Christianity from the courts of culture. In my last article I discussed "step 1" of their plan. In this discourse I will address steps 2 & 3. Step two: target...

“In the final analysis (God) used evolution to set us free.” Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller used this quote from his book “Finding Darwin’s God” as a central point in his speech about simultaneously believing in evolution and religion. Miller spoke to more than 500 people Thursday evening in the Kansas Union Ballroom. He testified for the pro-evolution side in the recent lawsuit against the Dover, Pa., school district, where a federal judge ruled against the district’s teaching of intelligent design in biology classrooms. He said it was creationism in disguise. Conservatives on the Kansas State Board of Education approved...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said here on Friday that the big powers' atheism is the rootcause of man's problems today. Addressing a group of locals, President Ahmadinejad said the only remedy to the plight is recourse to God and injunctions of the divine messengers. Ahmadinejad said the Iranian nation is on the path to progress, setting God Almighty as its ultimate goal. He said strong faith in God and monotheism are the key to durable peace and calm.

Allan Penn Daniel C. Dennett. Q: How could you, as a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, write a book that promotes the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology? Why would you hold a scientist's microscope to something as intangible as belief? I don't know about you, but I find St. Paul's and St. Peter's pretty physical. But your new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon," is not about cathedrals. It's about religious belief, which cannot be dissected in a lab as if it were a disease. That itself is a scientific...

Within less than 20 years, theistic religion will become the developed world's primary organizing and motivating force — not through orderly growth, but suddenly and by default, as today's wrongheaded social patterns and perspectives become untenable Monday, January 09, 2006 by William F. Clark "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man." — Catechism of the Catholic Church, Prologue "It is really so: the purpose of our lives...