Religion Causes War; Religion Brings Peace

Why is it that people think this is relevant, one way or another, to the veracity of religious claims? The claims are either true or not true, regardless of how profitable belief in them may be. If belief in gravity caused cancer, would gravity not exist?

Ordinary Claims

The title of this blog comes from the dictum, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The phrase -- based on a cursory Web search -- seems to have been originated with Paul Kurtz and been popularized by Carl Sagan.

By strict logic, it does not necessarily follow that ordinary claims require only ordinary evidence, though I do believe it to be the case in general. That is to say, there is an proportional and direct relationship between a claim's "exraordinariness" and the strength of the evidence its belief demands.

Further, it seems logical that, for any given level of "exraordinariness":

• The more evidence, the stronger the belief should be; the less evidence, the weaker it should be.
  
• The more important the claim's subject, the more certain one would like one's belief to be; the less important, the less important it is to be certain one way or the other.

It therefore follow that belief in gods, which is widely tied not only to the very meaning of life, but also its ultimate scope (eternal or finite), must be arrived at only after:

• Extraordinary evidence is presented, becaue the existence of gods is an extraordinary claim
• Even stronger evidence is presented, because the subject is of such great existential importance

And yet, believers tell us, we are to take it on "faith", which is to say, no evidence at all. Faith does not cut it when it comes to cashing a check. Why would it be sufficient when it comes to our very mortality?

Let's Get Started

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about atheism, including the work of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and a new movie from Bill Maher. What I find fascinating is how defensive even non-dogmatic believers are when it comes to these works. They are clearly seen as a threat, but are often dismissed as angry rants and therefore unserious, and are generally not engaged in detail by those who believe.

This blog is meant to disuss atheism as the only rational approach to life, and will attempt to navigate the arguments presented by both sides with a focus on what we know, not on what we wish, what is best for us, or what might be the case.