Real Atheology

This episode ran a bit long, so we're splitting it into two parts. Here we interview Dr. C.M. Lorkowski on his new book Atheism Considered: A Survey of the Rational Rejection of Religious Belief (2020).

This book is a systematic presentation of challenges to the existence of a higher power. Rather than engaging in a polemic against a religious worldview, Lorkowski charitably refutes the classical arguments for the existence of God, pointing out flaws in their underlying reasoning and highlighting difficulties inherent to revealed sources. In place of a theistic worldview, he argues for adopting a naturalistic one, highlighting naturalism’s capacity to explain world phenomena and contribute to the sciences. Lorkowski demonstrates that replacing theism with naturalism, contra popular assumptions, sacrifices nothing in terms of ethics or meaning.

In this interview, we take a tour of some of the major themes of the books with Dr. Lorkowski and discuss many topics including his background, the various arguments of natural theology, apologetics vs. philosophy, David Hume, and a whole host of other topics. This is definitely the episode for those who want introduced to the more philosophical aspects of atheism.

Dr. Lorkowski's work can be followed here: https://philpeople.org/profiles/c-m-lorkowski

This episode ran a bit long, so we're splitting it into two parts. Here we interview Dr. C.M. Lorkowski on his new book Atheism Considered: A Survey of the Rational Rejection of Religious Belief (2020).

This book is a systematic presentation of challenges to the existence of a higher power. Rather than engaging in a polemic against a religious worldview, Lorkowski charitably refutes the classical arguments for the existence of God, pointing out flaws in their underlying reasoning and highlighting difficulties inherent to revealed sources. In place of a theistic worldview, he argues for adopting a naturalistic one, highlighting naturalism’s capacity to explain world phenomena and contribute to the sciences. Lorkowski demonstrates that replacing theism with naturalism, contra popular assumptions, sacrifices nothing in terms of ethics or meaning.

In this interview, we take a tour of some of the major themes of the books with Dr. Lorkowski and discuss many topics including his background, the various arguments of natural theology, apologetics vs. philosophy, David Hume, and a whole host of other topics. This is definitely the episode for those who want introduced to the more philosophical aspects of atheism.

Dr. Lorkowski's work can be followed here: https://philpeople.org/profiles/c-m-lorkowski

For this episode, we interview Aron Lucas about his objection to the Fine Tuning argument in his paper "Naturalism, Fine-Tuning, and Flies" that is published at https://infidels.org/library/modern/aron_lucas/flies.html

For this episode, we interview philosopher Dr. Felipe Leon on the topic of Mitigated Modal Skepticism, the view that our modal knowledge is limited to the mundane.  It seeks to the ground our modal knowledge in empirical sources, such as observation and observation-sensitive theory. This would mean our modal knowledge can not be extended to possibilities critical to a large variety of theistic arguments. We end up covering a number of related topics in the philosophy of religion. Felipe also runs the ex-apologist philosophy of religion blog which has a wealth of fantastic content that listeners to this podcast will no doubt enjoy. http://exapologist.blogspot.com/ 

In this episode, the Bens get a fresh perspective from Zach Christ, a Muslim from America who now lives in Turkey. During the interview, Zach and the Bens compare and contrast the beliefs and philosophical defenses of Islam and Christianity, delving into the concepts of God, miracles, and the afterlife. They also discuss people's attitudes toward Islam in America and Turkey.

In this episode the Real Atheologians interview Jason Thibodeau about the famous Euthyphro Dilemma and how to respond to apologists who try to split the dilemma.  Jason is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Cypress College.

This is a follow-up episode on the Kalam Cosmological Argument where we interview philosopher Alex Malpass about his upcoming paper, co-authored with Wes Morriston, on the Kalam. Among other things, we discuss potential vs. actual/completed infinities, beginningless pasts, endless futures, and symmetry breakers.

We'd also like to apologize to our Patreons, this episodes our return to properly thanking each of you at the end of the episode. 

In this episode the Real Atheologians interview philosopher Dr. Graham Oppy.  We discuss the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, defining naturalism, the Modal Ontological Argument, and a number of issues in contemporary philosophy of religion.

This is a new beginning for Real Atheology as Ben Watkins welcomes Ben Bavar and John Lopilato as new co-hosts to the cast. Justin Schieber has taken a break from philosophy of religion in general to focus on college.

We’ve decided to start things off with a Big Bang by tackling the Kalam Cosmological argument!