Reddit mentions: The best agnosticism books

Former fedora atheist here. For a long time, I felt like I belonged to the "skeptical, rational, atheist" tribe. But at one point I became disillusioned with the crowd, and realized that I no longer want to be part of it. I started looking for alternatives, groups I'd want to be a part of, and I settled upon Catholicism. I first approached it from a purely secular perspective, as a serious and reliable institution. But I ended up accepting the faith and God as well.

Here's my progression, what drew me in more and more:

I. The intellectual life. I was always fascinated by science. It was interactions with promoters of dishonest creationism (usually evangelicals) that originally pushed me towards rejecting religion and to become a militant atheist.

Then I read a book that changed how I view the relation between Church and science: God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. I now follow @catholiclab and similar profiles on Twitter, which post interesting facts about Catholic scientists. It's simply astounding how this information is completely absent from contemporary popular culture.

II. Just on an emotional level, feeling "closer" to Catholics. It helped that my family is Catholic. On YouTube, I've watched many videos by Bishop Robert Barron, Fr. Mike. They are very lucid and reasonable in addressing contemporary issues. I'm sure there are many others.

I'm also reading biographies of martyrs who died persecuted in modernity by revolutionary ideologies. My TODO reading list includes books by Thomas Merton, Joseph Ratzinger, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

III. The aesthetics. I'm subscribed on Twitter to profiles like @Christian8Pics which post a lot of inspiring imagery. Familiarity breeds liking. I also listen to music on YouTube: liturgy, Medieval chants, Mozart's Requiem, Byzantine chants (usually Eastern Orthodox).

All these sideways might seem very strange to a Catholic convert or someone raised Catholic who stayed Catholic. But if someone is immersed in a materialistic, mechanistic and atheistic worldview, there's no available grammar or impulse to even take God or the life of the Church into consideration.

IV. Actually knowing what theism is all about. The "god" dismissed by popular atheist debaters is a caricature of God as understood by classical theism and the actual tradition of the Church. So is the "god" argued for by Intelligent Design proponents, biblical literalists, fundamentalists.

I read 2 books by Edward Feser (Catholic) and David Bentley Hart (Eastern Orthodox) to finally become comfortable with this very simple point. The books I read are, in order:

By Edward Feser:

• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
  
  
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  By David Bentley Hart:
  
  
• Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
  
  
• [The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss] (https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355)
  
  Each author has his own biases, which might trip the reader up at times (Hart is biased against evolutionary psychology for some reason). But these books produced in me a fresh view of where to begin seeking for God. They gave me the confidence to proceed.
  
  Atheism always addresses "god" as if it's simply one entity among others, part of the natural world, for which one ought to find physical traces and then one simply "believes in the existence of god" (much like you'd believe there's a car parked outside your house, once you look out the window and observe it's there -- meaning it could just as well NOT be there).
  
  Creationists just muddy the waters with "god of the gaps" and "Paley's watch" style theories, which simply postulate "god" as an explanation for why this or that aspect of the natural world is a certain way, a tinkerer god which molds the physical world into shape, or which created it at some point in the past.
  
  This has nothing to do with how God is presented by the authors I quoted, and they go to great lengths to make this point.
  
  I started by understanding that there needs to be an ultimate answer to certain metaphysical questions which, by definition, can't have a physical answer (e.g. "why does there exist a physical world in the first place?"). There's a qualitative difference between physical questions and metaphysical ones, and the gap simply can't be breached by adding more layers of physicality. Hart makes this point very well (he differentiates between the Demiurge that deists, atheists and creationists discuss, and God as the "necessary being" of classical theism).
  
  The ultimate metaphysical cause is "necessary" because it's simply a necessity for the physical world to have a non-physical cause which keeps it in existence. If the only thing that existed was a quantum field that didn't produce any particles, or a single proton that always existed and will always exist, the "necessity" would be exactly the same. Nothing would change even if it turned out our Universe is part of a Multiverse.
  
  Then, through reasoning, one can deduce certain characteristics of this ultimate answer, which ends up forming the classical theistic picture of God as a "necessary being" which continuously creates every aspect of the physical universe. Feser is very good at explaining this part and especially at underlining how tentative and feeble our understanding of the unfathomable is. He also explains why it has to be a "being" rather than an unknown impersonal cause. It's a humbling experience.
  
  But as Bishop Robert Barron stated in his interview on the Rubin Report, philosophy only takes you halfway there. Looking back, the existence of God simply makes sense and is a no-brainer. Faith doesn't have to do with "accepting that God exists with no evidence". Faith is about what you do once you realize that the existence of God is an inescapable conclusion of rational thought. What do you do once you realize that He exists and is conscious of us? You have to go beyond the impersonal, and engage, interact. Here's where prayer, the liturgical life and spiritual exercises come into play.
  
  Unlike conversion, faith isn't a one-time historical event, it's a daily effort on one's part to drive one's thoughts towards the infinite and the ultimate cause of everything. This requires individual effort, but it is not an individual venture. One has the entire tradition and life of the Church to guide you: selfless persons who dedicated their lives to help people like you and me.
  
  Here's how Feser, in his "Last Superstition" book, describes the various ways of conceiving of God:
  
  >To understand what serious religious thinkers do believe, we might usefully distinguish five gradations in one’s conception of God:
  
  >1. God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.
  
  >2. God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours. He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space. Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations. He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.
  
  >3. God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated. The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops. None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense. Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person. But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc. Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.
  
  >4. God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.
  
  >5. God as Aquinas knows Him now, i.e. as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.
  
  What I've been talking about is at #3. Atheists and creationists are debating #1 and #2. #4 is a gift to be accorded by grace, and is what people strive for in their spiritual life. #5 is the ultimate goal of the Christian life.

I'll take a stab at answering this. Credentials: I'm a PhD student in artificial intelligence who does philosophy as a hobby.

The short answer is that Feser's critiques are basically valid for current computers, but I'm highly skeptical that they would extend to full artificial general intelligences when we build such things.

First, some background. Feser is a neo-scholastic or neo-Thomist; his philosophy is grounded in an Aristotelian worldview as mapped out by Thomas Aquinas in the middle ages. Because of this tradition, he tends to focus a lot of analysis on Aristotle's four causes (material, formal, efficient, final) and their implications, and to use words like "substance," "artifact," and "causal powers." This worldview is a significant departure from most modern literature on philosophy of mind, and most philosophers of mind today would reflexively call his arguments confused and outdated (I tend to agree, although I think they have more merit than people give them credit for).

The modern philosopher who argues most similarly to Feser with regards to philosophy of mind is John Searle, whom Feser references several times in the article. Here, Feser is mostly trying to avoid using Aristotelian jargon, making an argument more in line with Searle's terminology and thus more intelligible to modern thinkers, though he still slips in a reference or two to "causal powers". (In fact, Feser believes that the human mind is immaterial and created directly by God, though he claims that this is irrelevant to the point he is making in the article; see his book The Last Superstition).

In the blog post, Feser is not refuting the best current philosophy of AI, but rather a strawman with a shallow pop-philosophy understanding of computation and mind. To be fair, these criticisms are warranted because many people actually do make the mistake of thinking that the brain is exactly like a computer, or that current AI programs actually have the beginnings of minds. Feser rightly points out that neither thing is true: the comparison between human brains and current computer architectures is merely superficial. Brains have many properties that we do not yet understand and do not capture in computers. Conversely, computers today, even those programmed with "artificial neural networks," are not remotely brainlike or conscious.

Quick sidebar: the usage of the word "intelligence." Feser seems to use the word "intelligence" interchangeably with "mind" or "consciousness," but I would not equate those things at all. They are separate axes of description. To an AI researcher, "intelligence" means something like "competence at achieving goals." It is clearly possible for machines to be more intelligent than humans in this sense: the program AlphaGo is more intelligent at playing the game of Go than human experts, though it does not understand what it is doing or have a mind per se. In the future, we will have machines that are more competent than humans at achieving nearly any goal, and this is what we would call an artificial general intelligence (AGI). What Feser (and also Searle) really means to argue is that such an AGI could never in principle have a mind or a consciousness, merely an unconscious simulation of those things.

Okay, finally, on to the actual arguments presented in the post!

Here Feser is using variations of one primary argument that was also made by John Searle: physical systems are never intrinsically computational because the very notion of "computation" is observer-dependent. In other words, whether or not something is called a "computer" is relative to how some observer is analyzing the physical system, and is not any intrinsic property of the system. Therefore, it is a category mistake to equate "mind" with "computation," because minds exist independently in reality but computation does not! For example, a Go-playing AI is only a computational system when we mentally associate the program's inputs and outputs with the state of a Go board; otherwise is it just an electrical circuit performing meaningless physical bit flips, an artifact, a dead thing. If we try hard enough, we can interpret any physical system as a computer: in some sense, a glass of water is a perfect computation of itself. Does than mean a glass of water is intrinsically computational? No, it's only computational with regards to how we are viewing it.

So the logic goes something like this:

1. Minds are real properties of some systems, like brains (we know this because we have minds).
   
2. Computation is not a real property of any system, because it is observer dependent. (Much like the property of being-a-hammer is relative to how humans are using a thing, and is not a real physical property of objects independent of humans).
   
3. Therefore, no system is a mind by virtue of being a computation.
   
4. Therefore, a computer, by definition, will never be a mind because of its relative computational properties, no matter how complex. If it somehow is a mind, it must be in virtue of something else, such as an unknown physical property (a la Searle) or direct endowment by God (a la Aquinas).
   
   So, does this succeed in proving that advanced artificial intelligences will never have minds? No, I don't think it does. What it does succeed in doing is pointing out how naively equating the mind with the concept of "computation" can lead to bad magical thinking.
   
   As an student working in AI, I can tell you that the way the word "computation" is used here is a bit simplistic and naive. Modern AI researchers do not think this way. It's true that computers and brains are extremely dissimilar in operation, but "computation" itself is a general conceptual model that can describe both. When we says that brains "compute" this or that, we are using mathematical models of computation to explain certain data and to make certain predictions about how the brain works. We are not saying that the brain is somehow fundamentally a computer; rather, that features of its operation can be understood as computational in a certain context. But that's also exactly how we treat computers! Fundamentally, what we call a computer is not some magical artifact performing some mystical metaphysical function of "computation"; rather, it is a physical system that can be mathematically understood as computational in certain contexts. But with computers, we have designed them to be hyper-optimized to align with our conceptual models of computation. Transistors are designed to have two physical states: "on" and "off", and this allows us to easily represent their state with the symbols 0 and 1, and perform analysis from there. The brain, designed by evolution, is not optimized for intelligibility, but nevertheless we can draw computational analogies with extra effort.
   
   So what we have are two physical systems, the brain and modern computers, both of which can be modeled computationally (one more easily than the other), neither of which are intrinsically computational as physical systems. So how do we decide whether one or the other is capable of being conscious?
   
   Clearly brains can be conscious, because we are brains and we have consciousness. But how do I, as a single brain, know that you, another brain, are actually conscious? I don't - this is the famous problem of Other Minds. I am making an inference to the best explanation - you have a brain like mine, and your behavior is like mine, so I am inferring that you probably have a mind like mine.
   
   But now suppose we have a highly intelligent computer which passes the Turing test. Does it have a mind? It's certainly acing the behavioral similarity criterion, but the problem comes when we try to use the physical similarity criterion - how do we score the similarity between a silicon architecture and a brainlike architecture? In one sense, the two are made of different materials and are nothing alike on a microscopic level, so we might think that there is no way to tell if the computer is conscious. On the other hand, we can draw higher-level computational analogies between our brains and the algorithm being run on the silicon. The fact that computational descriptions are observer-dependent is beside the point - all models are observer dependent - the point is that it can be argued that physical systems described by similar computational models probably share other properties as well, such as mental states. This is an inference to the best explanation. Given what our minds do when they represent concepts, we can build very close analogs to these processes into the operation of the AI. The more we learn about the brain, the more likely it seems that mental properties are invariant to different low-level descriptions of systems, depending only on higher-level causal properties easily modeled by computations; if so, then minds are multiply-realizable, and computers can have minds.
   
   (Continued in a reply to this comment because too long to fit in one post)

> I want to believe wicca is true, and astrology too. But the evidence is too overwhelimg that they really aren't. I want to feel spiritual again, but I'm too solid in my logical atheist mind. What should I do? Any similar experiences?

Well, you need to ask yourself a fundamental epistemological question: do I want to believe true things?

If you answer yes, then so much baggage is immediately shed: it no longer matters what you wish was true; desires have no bearing on whether something actually makes up reality. Instead you're now free to ask other questions, like: what is the best way to determine if something is true?

I find epistemology to be an engaging and enormously rewarding process. Here's a great place to start if you're interested.

Obviously, it's not all sunshine and roses! Just answering 'yes, I want to believe things that are true' doesn't do away with the fact that there is also still a reason you want astrology to be true, or wicca to be true. Perhaps you like the idea that the position of the heavenly bodies influence your life because it gives you a sense of guidance, or a sense of acceptance for the things that are outside of your control.

There's a book I heard of recently, that I haven't read but sounded interesting: Everybody is Wrong about God.

The reason I'm interested to read this book is that it sounds like it acknowledges something very important:

> The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in “God,” they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action.

You have reasons you want to believe in these things. These reasons still exist even now that you've decided these things probably aren't true. Your next step is working out what those reasons are, and if there's a way you can meet those needs within a framework that is based in reality.

Of course, if you answer 'no, I don't care about believing true things' then go nuts!

Living in a fallen world not only affects our ability to make good decisions, but it has also affected our physical world. There are biological imperfections, such as infertility, that occur due to living in a fallen world. It sucks a ton. Adam brought these terrible sufferings upon us (often my husband says he can't wait to punch Adam in the face) but our good God has given us a way to use those sufferings for good and that we can take those challenges and become better people if we continue to trust in God through them.

If you feel like you need a more intellectual basis for a belief in God, there are really good books out there explaining why God exists.

One is The Last Superstition by Edward Feser. https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314517/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Another is Who Designed the Designer by Michael Augros. https://www.amazon.com/Who-Designed-Designer-Rediscovered-Existence/dp/1586179691/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

If you would like a great book on how to keep peace of heart during trials, I would recommend Searching for and Maintaining Peace. https://www.amazon.com/Searching-Maintaining-Peace-Small-Treatise/dp/0818909064

I think if you can get to the point where you do acknowledge there is a God due to the logical basis for Him and that this God must be good due the logical basis for what kind of God He is, you might be able to trust Him more. We can't really trust someone we don't know too well.

Prayers for you and your wife during this very stressful time. I hope you two try to find ways to relax amidst the stress.

>I don't need to. The assertions is that a physical thing can't create another physical thing. That is demonstrably untrue. You're placing restricting characteristics, not me.

It's not that a physical thing can't create another physical thing (even though it would actually be a physical thing creating a physical thing out of nothing), it's that the werewolf, a physical thing, would have nowhere to be while creating the universe, and no time to do it in.

>If a wearwolf doesn't exist, it can be whatever definition I'd like. Just like your god.

No this is idiotic. The word werewolf has a definition. You can't just change the definition however you'd like. If you can, then the conversation is meaningless because you'll just change it to be exactly like god, and then we're not talking about werewolves anymore.

> I would need to know why you think anything is likely in order to demonstrate why my wearwolf is likely. You would have to present your argument for why god is likely to have created the universe. I can then replace god with anything, and the argument will probably not change, if it's any of the popular ones. To be clear. Any argument I present would be a straw man of whatever you actually believe God is. I don't know how else to explain this.

Wrong. What I have to do is show why a werewolf is less likely to have created the universe than god, and I have. You don't seem to have anything to say in response.

>It is informed. Not sure that infants have developed morals, but I'm sure you have a well thought out argument on why slavery and genocide are cool.

I never said slavery and genocide are cool, I said you have an infantile understanding of religion.

>They're equally likely within the context of an argument for the likelihood of any being creating a universe. I personally don't think the likelihood of either is even measurable. If you say god is likely, because of reasons. I could replace god with a wearwolf, and the reasons wouldn't need to change.

Yeah you keep saying this and it's not true. You get that you're supposed to be making an argument, right? All you're doing is repeating that they're same over and over, and not explaining how. Prove to me that they're the same likelihood. Why are you saying anything else? All you should be doing is proving that, or taking back what you said.

>If a being needs to be capable of creating a universe to create a universe, then that is the only characteristic necessary for creating a universe. Adding additional requirements only makes it harder to prove. My wearwolf can be both a wearwolf and have the ability to create a universe. That ability wouldn't make it less of a wearwolf. It could possibly be more likely, because the characteristics of a wearwolf can be found in nature. Whereas the common characteristics given to a god are found NOWHERE. So what seems like a bigger stretch? But again, if you assert that additional characteristics are required to be capable of creating a universe, the onus is on you to argue that assertion.

The fact that there were men and wolves in nature absolutely does not make it more likely that a werewolf created the universe, because NOTHING about men or wolves would indicate that they can create universes. In fact, we know so much about them that it makes it way less likely. God, being defined as an all-powerful metaphysical being is much more likely to have created the universe, because nothing about the nature of god, as is traditionally defined, prevents it from doing so.

>A omniscient god would know. Otherwise, we could start with any that is measurable and predictable, and work our way towards a reasonable conclusion.

An omniscient god would know what?

>I don't have an argument to present unless you give me your reason for believing a universe creating being is likely at all. Then we can discuss why a wearwolf is as equally as likely as a that being. I have no idea why you think what you think, and I'm not going to guess from a wiki page.

You're very confused. I'm not proving to you that god exists, I'm proving to you that it's more likely that god created the universe than a werewolf. The fact that there is a long line of argumentation for god is itself evidence, because there is no corresponding argumentation for a werewolf creating the universe. If you have some, feel free to present it. Since you flippantly dismissed the fact that I gave you a wikipedia page to introduce you to apologetics, here are some books:

https://www.amazon.com/Mere-Christianity-C-S-Lewis/dp/0060652926/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1509549912&sr=1-1&keywords=mere+christianity

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=V2XKAWX4HD8JGV0KGHDZ

https://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851686908/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=V2XKAWX4HD8JGV0KGHDZ

https://www.amazon.com/Five-Proofs-Existence-Edward-Feser/dp/1621641333

"I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance." -Luke 15:7

You are never further away from the Church than one confession. Take 20 minutes and do a solid examination of conscience. This is not an exercise in beating yourself up. It is a way to do a thorough job of taking out the garbage, because we don't want any of it around anymore. One of the amazing things about Christ is that while we can give him beautiful gifts, we can also give him our baggage, and it its place he will give us peace. Don't be anxious if you're not sure how many times you committed a sin or if you can't remember other exact details. God knows your heart and what you are repenting of. Your local parish should hear confessions every Saturday, but you can probably also call them up and request a confession by appointment (face to face or in private) at another time.

"Once, St. Teresa was overwhelmed with God's Goodness and asked Our Lord "How can I thank you?" Our Lord replied, "ATTEND ONE MASS."

In addition to going to confession, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you begin attending mass on Sundays. Christ is the center of our faith, and he is present with us, as though he were standing behind a veil, at every mass.


I don't have a quote for this last bit of advice, but ask questions! I have at times had questions which gnawed at me like a junkyard dog, so I gnawed at the Church with the same tenacity, and I have always eventually found a completely satisfying answer.

This applies your political beliefs in particular. Our obligation as Catholics is to continually form our conscience, not to simply parrot the Church line. You're not a bad Catholic if you aren't immediately on board with everything the Church teaches. I'd suggest turning your energies to charitable but forceful questions on these topics.

The answers you receive might be a good way to explain your change of heart to your friends and family. For example, "I thought Dawkins and Hitchens were pretty convincing until I learned that they don't even engage actual Christian scholasticism." I'd recommend Edward Feser for those two.

> What exactly is problematic with a normative paradigm that involves respect and civility?

There's nothing wrong with such a paradigm. There is something wrong with embracing and enforcing such a paradigm while disavowing normativity/morality as such. No-one's talking about religion here - the only thing we're discussing is morality. The point I'm trying to make here is that normativity just is morality - if you disagree, name one plausible difference between a normative paradigm and a moral paradigm - so a normative/moral paradigm that disavows morality/normativity is simply and plainly absurd.

>First and foremost only certain people are asking for your guidance on what is good for them in the temporal or eternal sense. I for one don't need or want it.

It doesn't matter who's asking for guidance. That does not make the matter any less true, nor divest one of his duty to convince others of the truth. If you see a man suffering the symptoms of a certain kind of poisoning and attempt to inform him so, him angrily telling you, "I didn't ask for your opinion!" doesn't change the fact that he is being poisoned, or make walking away and ignoring him the moral/"civil"/"respectful" thing to do.

>Religion is based on faith, which in itself is a beautiful thing, but can't be forced or imposed.

Wrong. First off, if by "faith" you mean "belief without justification" then I have no idea what you're talking about, since such a belief ought be called delusion. The justification for Catholicism is really quite simple:

P1 Jesus preached what he did, including claiming to be a divine messenger.

P2 Jesus performed miracles, witnessed by many.

P3 These miracles convinced many men to undergo great hardships and sufferings for comparatively little gain.

SC1 (P1, P2, P3) Jesus' miracles were divine, and acted as a divine stamp of approval for his teachings.

P4 The record of his teachings and miracles has been passed down through the generations by the Catholic Church, to which he has granted authority to interpret his teachings.

C Faith in the Catholic Church is justified.

Of course, for the intelligent and inquisitive, a deeper and stronger understanding can be had from the study of theology. Classical theology typically builds upon a metaphysical edifice that is quite foreign to modern minds. The Last Superstition is a good entry-level book that argues for an Aristo-Thomist metaphysics and shows how belief in the existence of a Supreme Being, and some of the moral conclusions you ridicule here, arise from it.

But as you can see here, belief in Catholicism - including the attendant moral beliefs - can be entirely reasonably and objectively justified. So I do not see the problem with believing and acting as though they were universally binding objective truths, since that is indeed what I think they are.

>You don't respect those disordered homosexuals. I get it.

No, you don't respect homosexuals. You reduce their identities entirely to their homosexual desires, so a condemnation of those desires is in your understanding equivalent to a condemnation of them as people.

I honestly cannot understand how such egregious doublethink can be maintained. One does not say that condemnation of a sociopath's desires and punishment of his resultant destructive behaviour is somehow fundamentally disrespectful to the sociopath.

>I personally think that a lot of those mental processes are disordered

The object of sexual intercourse is procreation. This is objectively the case, in the same way that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood or the purpose of the bladder is to store urine. Yes, you can pump a bladder with air and use it as a rugby ball but that doesn't change the fact that its purpose qua body part, objectively speaking, is to store urine. Likewise, the purpose of one's sexual faculties is procreation. To use them in such a way that this purpose is deliberately frustrated, such as using one's wife's hand to masturbate or attempting to ape sexual intercourse with a member of the same sex despite such activity being intrinsically non-procreative, is what we call "disordered", since it deliberately frustrates the purpose of the act.

I hope you realise by now that "disordered" is not just Catholic-speak for "wtf" or "ew gross".

In brief conclusion:

• All normative paradigms are moral paradigms, and vice versa. Hence a normative paradigm disavowing morality is a normative paradigm disavowing normativity - a contradiction.
  
• We hold our moral opinions to be objectively true and hence universally binding, regardless of other people's opinions on them.
  
• (Irrelevant digression) Delusional "blind" faith is not the basis for religious belief, but rather an entirely justified chain of reasoning for most people, sometimes supported by a rich edifice of theology and philosophy in the case of theologians, apologists, and internet enthusiasts.
  
• Condemnation of behaviour or desires is not equivalent to condemnation of people. Not an important point but bloody annoying when people keep making this claim.
  
• There is an objective, philosophical reason for us to pronounce certain acts as disordered and hence sinful.
  
  I believe these points suffice for an answer to any you have raised in this post.

I commend you to start doing some personal research on acquainting yourself with the literature defending the rational justifiability of Christianity. The work of professional analytic philosophers persuaded of Christianity like William Lane Craig and Edward Feser would be, I think, indispensable to your intellectual development if you would give them a chance. Reasonablefaith.org has amassed tons of material answering just about anything you could ask about or argue against Christianity (see the Q&A section, popular articles section and podcasts). His work Reasonable Faith sets out a defense of Christianity in general, offers various defenses of God's existence and explicates the historical evidence for some of the New Testament's most central claims (such as the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth).

Edward Feser's latest book Five Proofs of the Existence of God systematically defends the five most historically significant arguments for the existence of God, which have survived scrutiny and enjoyed wide assent for centuries, the present ignorance of which in mainstream atheism and academic philosophy says nothing about the arguments themselves and everything about the (pitiful) state of contemporary philosophy (not to mention the quality of religious discourse today). His book The Last Superstition is a more approachable but less ambitious project rebutting the arguments of and generally responding to the "new atheist" movement (championed by Richard Dawkins and his ilk).

It so happens that Dr. Feser was an atheist for about 10 years after he began his studies of philosophy and, subsequently, he experienced a complete shift of paradigm that he attributes to his studies of the arguments for God's existence and the general truth of Christianity. That's not to say he must be right or that he's therefore impervious to bias, but I hope it helps cast doubt on the popular atheist assertion that Christian belief can only consist in emotion-driven fideism.

I wouldn't expect to find every conclusion of both of these writers to be compelling or convincing (I personally disregard Craig's arguments from contemporary astrophysics simply on the grounds that the science they adduce is subject to future revision, for example), but the general impression I hope this will make to you is that extremely intelligent, reflective Christians who can offer an articulate and well-reasoned defense of their beliefs aren't hard to find.

David Bently Hart and C.S. Lewis would also be worth looking into.

As for critiquing the atheistic worldview indirectly, I think the points made in this essay are quite salient. In it it is argued that atheism is impossible to be lived out consistently and that, therefore, no self-described atheist is capable of manifesting logical consistency in their lifestyle or with respect to the peripheries of their belief systems and fundamental presuppositions about the value of human life, the meaningfulness of the concept of morality, and so on.

I should also add that educating yourself on theology in a systematic fashion would be extremely helpful in learning to defend Christianity (after all, you can't really defend an idea you have yet to completely understand or define). There's a long lecture series on Reasonablefaith.org under the "defenders class" with a curriculum on theology that I think would be an excellent resource and, perhaps, a place to start.

I'm also open to talking to you if you're interested. God bless!

> I want to start going again, but dealing with his anti Catholicism and New Atheist Facebook posts, etc as a practicing Catholic just sounds emotionally exhausting. Plus I'd have to attend church alone with our toddler, who tries to make a break for the altar every time she's set loose.

Going to mass without your husband is better than not going at all. Moreover, other people should not inhibit your ability to practice the Faith. Concerning the New Atheist Facebook posts, if your husband finds that kind of material even remotely convincing, I would recommend he read Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.

> Then I start wondering what the point even is because she will probably just end up being an atheist because of his example.

Set a better example than your husband and make an effort to show your child that there are good reasons to be a Catholic. Read and study apologetic books like William Lane Craig's On Guard and/or Trent Horn's Why We're Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, and Love so that you are better equipped to defend the Faith. When your daughter is old enough, she can read these books and other apologetics books for herself. Also, it wouldn't be a bad idea for your husband to read these same books. Although, William Lane Craig's On Guard for Students was written specifically for non-Christians; so it might be a better option than On Guard, which is intended for Christians.

> You can only pray for the same thing over and over so many times with no change before it starts feeling hopeless.

Keep praying. If you are not already doing so, pray the Rosary. Even if God is not granting you the request(s) made in your prayers, know that there is a good reason for doing so. The reason(s) may never be known during your time on earth, but do not allow this to damage your relationship with God.

> The prospect of returning just feels so lonely. Our parish is huge and no one ever says a word to me. Does anyone have any advice or encouragement?

Many parishes have bible studies or meetups of some kind that would give you the opportunity to meet other Catholics. It is better to feel lonely and do what is right than not feel lonely and fail to do what is right.

I'm not sure how much my words will be of use for you, as I am myself not yet Catholic (I'm currently going through RCIA). However, I can relate with regard to a lack of Catholic friends. I'm an immigrant from India who was raised in a Hindu family; most of my friends are Indian and nominally Hindu. I've had only a couple of Christian friends in my life and never a Catholic friend. Reading and researching through books, articles, podcasts, videos, etc. have led me to the faith.

Oftentimes, in defending the faith, I have debated my family, my friends, and others close to me. It became clear to me that I needed a systematic plan if I was going to do this with any shred of ability. Here's mine. Perhaps it will be of use to you or somebody else who clicks on your post because they can relate.

1. Learn logic. I'm working through Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft right now. It's clear, readable, has plenty of examples, many of which are from interesting works, such as those of G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis. It's an investment, to be sure, as it's running for ~ $20 online, but it's well worth it.
   
   
2. Study Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy. St. Thomas Aquinas is the universal doctor of the Catholic Church. You're not going to find a better source of philosophy, theology, and wisdom than this saint. Now, I don't recommend jumping right into the Summa Theologica or the Summa Contra Gentiles, at least not without a study guide, primarily because modern thought holds assumptions which Aquinas would have rejected. Therefore, to understand Aquinas' arguments, and really the arguments of any philosopher before Descartes, you need to understand the basic metaphysics (the understanding of being as being) of the classical (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) and medieval (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) philosophers. Edward Feser is an American analytical philosopher who is also an orthodox Roman Catholic. He's written two books which I would highly recommend. First, and foremost, I think you will be well served by his The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (I'm sure you can see why). It's very readable but also deep. It's also polemical; you'll laugh out loud quite a bit. Second, I would recommend his Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide. This is an introduction to Thomistic philosophy. It goes over the metaphysical foundations, Aquinas' Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God, Aquinas' philosophy of ethics, and Aquinas' philosophy of psychology.
   
   
3. Once you have worked through these three books, I think you'll be ready to work through the more difficult works. However, and this is key, the vast, vast, vast majority of atheists and skeptics you'll come across and meet in your journey through this world can be easily and completely refuted if you familiarize yourself with and understand and think through the arguments laid out by Feser in these two books. Depending on your intelligence level and the availability of time, going through these three books might take you a bit of time. Don't worry. Take it slow. Once you understand their relevance and validity, you'll be able to both defend the faith and also show how atheism is false, incoherent, and dangerous.
   
   In summary, I'd recommend reading the following books in this order:
   
4. The Last Superstition by Edward Feser: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504537006&sr=8-1&keywords=the+last+superstition
   
5. Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide by Edward Feser: https://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Guides-ebook/dp/B00O0G3BEW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1504537006&sr=8-2&keywords=the+last+superstition
   
6. Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft: https://www.amazon.com/Socratic-Logic-Questions-Aristotelian-Principles/dp/1587318083/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
   
   God Bless and take care.

> Then so is god. You have not explained to me why you really believe god need not be questioned in exactly the same way. God is something. What caused the something.

It’s so silly to think that the Principle of Sufficient Reason disproves or undercuts god! The Principle of Sufficient Reason was created by theists. You’d think they would have noticed if it destroys the thing they were trying to prove. Rather, the PSR is an argument FOR god.

I can’t believe you’re still asking me, “What caused the something” referring to what caused god. I’ve been over this many times. God is uncaused and necessary. Don’t you dare ask me why the universe can’t be uncaused and necessary, because the answer is that the universe is contingent.

I know you’ve heard this one before. Asking “what happened at the time 5 minutes before the big bang” is like asking “what location is 5 feet more north of the North Pole”? It is an incoherent question. Asking, “What caused god” is similarly incoherent. I linked this explanation before and you didn’t seem to read it or take it to heart. http://rocketphilosophy.blogspot.com/2014/01/carl-sagan-where-did-god-come-from.html

> This all parses out to semantically null to me. What exactly is pure actuality? Speak English.

See, you’ve basically just confessed to me that you don’t understand the cosmological argument. You’re so sure that the cosmological argument is wrong, or that you’ve disproved it, and you don’t even know the jargon that is necessary for understanding the proof. How can you expect me to take you seriously when you say the proof is invalid, when you constantly demonstrate that you don’t even understand it?

> God has no actuality. God has no potential. Because, god can do nothing that can be observed. God does not exist.

Nuh uh, you don’t exist, so there! (See how easy it is to just claim things without argument?)

> My objection is not a unique objection. It is the turtles all the way down objection.

That wasn’t an objection. The four objections still involved god, talking about his essence or nature or whatever. Notice how your language of “turtles all the way down” fits in no where here. And how you can’t understand the words you read, but you’re convinced they’re bullshit anyway.

> If god created everything, who created god?

Sigh, god is uncreated.

> It merely pushes the question. If you are capable of saying that god always existed, why are you incapable of saying the laws of physics always existed?

Sigh, because the laws of physics are contingent.

The next time you ask, “Why god for this but not physics for this?” answer, “Because one is necessary and one is contingent.” That’s always the answer.

> You see god as different. I do not.

Because you don’t understand.

> If the universe requires a prime mover, so does the prime mover.

That doesn’t follow.

> I'm a geek. I'm more practical than you.

You don’t know me.

> Your creator is by his nature more complex than the entire universe is today. But, the early universe was a very simple, albeit very energetic, object. It is easier for me to imagine simplicity first then evolving (not biological evolution but physical evolution like that of stars) over time to become the complex entity we have today.
To explain the simple universe by creating something so complex literally complicates the problem. It answers nothing for me. I don't understand why you can't see that.
God is divinely simple.

> Wouldn't your god hypothesis predict a kinder, gentler universe? Perhaps that should be the testable hypothesis for your god. If so, s/he fails.

No. If something in empirical reality were to contradict god’s existence, then we would weaken the definition of god and pick the strongest definition of god we could be certain exists. Why would we want to commit ourselves to a notion of god which we know has already been disproven? That’s so silly.

You could look at things like, “God predicts a kinder universe. The universe sucks. Therefore god doesn’t exist.” Or you could look at things like, “God has been proven to exist. The universe sucks. Therefore, there must be a reason consistent with the existence of god, for why the universe sucks.”

> All of that and, of course, the biggest hole in all of your faulty logic. There's still no evidence.

Sigh. A lack of physical evidence is not a hole in logic. If this were the case, then every philosophical argument would similarly have “faulty logic”. Something can have valid logic without empirical proof. I need you to understand basic distinctions between rational and empirical evidence.

Like, let me remind you of Zeno. Don’t you dare say that Zeno is “illogical”. What is suggested by his philosophy might be contradicted by empirical reality, but this does not imply there was a logical mistake in Zeno’s reasoning. Things are more subtle than this. An argument might be valid, but have untrue premises. In that case, there is no problem with the logic. An argument might also be sound, meaning it has true premises and a true conclusion. Zeno’s paradoxes might be sound, but something about our reality does not conform to his argument. One can’t just say, “That doesn’t seem to mesh well with physical reality” and then conclude that the argument is invalid or unsound.

> Actually, I've read many books on science written for an educated lay audience. Evolution, neuroscience, string theory, particle physics, general relativity, biology, etc. All of these can be made understandable to a lay person.

Only on the most superficial level. If you want a little kid’s explanation, go get a kid’s bible. Or one of those books about god designed for a dumb audience.

If you want a book for an educated lay audience, read: http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Superstition-Refutation-Atheism/dp/1587314525

> Further, your field is not a technical one. Your field is all word play. It has more in common with the legal profession.

Calling it word play doesn’t point out where the flaw in the words are.

> And, if I ask a lawyer to explain a contract to me in plain language, s/he can do so, provided s/he is a competent lawyer and understands the contract her/himself.
I’ve explained it in simple language. There is a source of all change. This source of all change is necessary, not contingent. Certain properties of the source of all change are later derived.

You don’t seem to think that we can do away with lawyers, yet you seem to think that theologians do absolutely nothing of substance. Nothing that could be called rigorous thinking.

This book is a critique from what is popularly known as "New Atheism" but with a Nietzschean philosophical slant permeating throughout the entirety of the text. Also, I've upgraded my views based on the best evidence that I've read from social and cognitive psychology books in my attempt at a blistering critique of religion in defense of human rights. While I'm sure that's not what most people would expect given Nietzsche's views and proclivities, I admire the fact that he was a philosopher who - like the Buddha - flat out stated that you shouldn't follow his philosophy to obey his every word, but rather use what you find useful and improve upon it to the best of your efforts. This is my attempt at just that.

Also, if people would prefer a physical copy, the physical edition is finally out: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1733901701/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i3



Update: Due to popular feedback, I decided to make split versions of the ebook edition for anyone who found 2554 pages too daunting but are still interested in reading my book. In case any of you are still interested.

Part I Only.

Part II Only.

Explanation on pricing can be read here.

Alright here are some of the best resources I know as a Catholic. Hope they help!

Edward Feser's blog as well as his The Last Superstition and 5 Proofs of the Existence of God

Stephen Barr's Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Francis Collin's The Language of God

Anthony Flew's There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind

Thomas Wood's How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Brant Pitre's The Case For Jesus

Tim O Neill on the Church and science, the Inquisition and the Galileo affair

Jenny Hawkins on Jesus and God, early Christianity and form criticism

Al Moritz on the Fine Tuning Argument

>There is a reason someone should believe in the supernatural and mystical aspects of Christianity. This is a large issue for me. Solely based on supernatural and mystical ideas, from an outsider perspective, Christianity is no different than animism or Buddhism. I can't have faith alone.

Well when you look at the world's religions, Christianity has a clear and impressive advantage in the miracles/mystical department. Historically, in Christianity, there have been numerous cases of Eucharistic miracles, Marian apparitions, miraculous healings and the spiritual gifts and religious experiences of countless Christian saints -- men and women of great virtue whose admirable character only add to the credibility of their testimony. Examples of these include Paul, Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Hildegard of Bingen, Anthony of Padua, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Vincent Ferrer, Joan of Arc, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Catherine Emmerich, John Vianney, Anna Maria Taigi, Genma Galangi, Faustina Kowalska and Padre Pio. We also have a pair of impressive relics, the shroud of Turin and the sudarium of Orvieto. I'll also throw in Catholic exorcisms.

And these Eucharistic miracles, Marian apparitions and religious/mystical experiences continue to happen today.

What do Buddhism and animism have in comparison?

>Anything that discusses and argues against some common tropes from atheists such as Mother Teresa being a vile, sadistic person.

Honestly, I'm quite stunned at the portrait atheists have painted of her. At worst, she wasn't perfect and made mistakes. She cannot be a vile monster like Hitchens claims she was, that's ridiculous. Here are some articles that defend Mother Teresa -- here, here, here and here.

Check out any of Mother Teresa's personal writings (e.g. No Greater Love, A Simple Path, Come Be Thy Light) to see what she believed in, what she valued and how she saw the world. Check out books written by people who actually knew her such as that of Malcolm Muggeridge, an agnostic BBC reporter who ended up converting to Catholicism because of Teresa and ended up becoming a lifelong friend of hers. Or that of her priest, friend and confessor, Leo Maasburg, who was able to recall 50 inspiring stories of Mother Teresa. Or that of Conroy, a person who actually worked with her. Or any biography of hers. Find out what she was like according to the people around her. Then afterwards, determine for yourself if she resembles Hitchen's "monster" or the Catholic Church's "saint".

The original question didn't request a philosophical premise for God's existence. It questioned the definition of faith, and those are the two links I provided. The analogy of "knowing" someone through rationality vs. experience isn't Bishop Barron's proof for God's existence. For better discussion on that from him, you'll want to look here:

• Bishop Barron on Scientism and God's Existence
  
  
• Bishop Barron on God's Existence and the Argument From Desire
  
  
• Bishop Barron on Why We Believe In God
  
  
• Bishop Barron on St. Thomas Aquinas and the Argument From Motion
  
  
• Bishop Barron on the New Atheists
  
  
• Bishop Barron on the Flying Spaghetti Monster and God
  
  And it would be worthwhile to dedicate some time to other resources like the Pints With Aquinas Podcast, specifically these episodes:
  
  
• Aquinas' 4th Proof for God's Existence
  
  
• If God Exists, Why Isn't His Existence More Obvious?
  
  
• The Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas, with Robert Delfino
  
  
• Tell Me About The Argument For God's Existence From Motion
  
  
• The Argument From Possibility And Necessity: Aquinas' Third Way
  
  
• What Is Pascal's Wager?
  
  
• Why Does Every Atheist Misunderstand Your Arguments For God's Existence?
  
  
• Can Philosophy Prove The Beginning Of The Universe?
  
  
• How To Remember Aquinas' Five Proofs For God's Existence
  
  
• Responding To Hank Green's Objections To Aquinas' Five Ways
  
  
• Trent Horn vs. Ricky Gervais
  
  
• What Does It Mean To Say That God's Essence Is Existence?
  
  
• Does God Exist? Michael Nugent vs. William Lane Craig
  
  
• Can You Explain Your Argument For God From Design?
  
  
• Isn't It Foolish To Believe What You Cannot See?
  
  
• Four Arguments From Atheists Refuted, With Dr. Randal Rauser
  
  
• What Is The Contingency Argument For God's Existence?
  
  
• Has Science Done Away With The Need For God?
  
  
• Give Me An Argument For The Existence of God
  
  
• Does Evil Disprove God's Existence?
  
  
• Do We Need Faith To Know God Exists?
  
  
  Beyond that, I'd point someone to some of the better books out on the topic:
  
  
• The Last Superstition by Ed Feser
  
  
• Answering Atheism By Trent Horn
  
  
• Does God Exist? A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways by Matt Fradd
  
  I realize I went all in there, but I want to ensure any atheist with an earnest desire for truth gets the best foot put forth by Christian thinkers for God's existence. Hopefully these resources are useful in some way. Cheers.

You are describing our identical paths -- I left the church shortly after confirmation, which was solidified by my classes in philosophy at a university. I spent the next decade or so slowly working my way back.

All I can tell you is that the Spirit, via the Blessed Sacrament, never let me go, never gave up. It took several years of my wavering between suppressing that voice and listening to that voice for me to finally "give in." In my case I needed a retreat weekend that continually broke down the emotional and spiritual walls I had built against the voice of the Spirit.

From the intellectual perspective, I can tell you that without true conversion of the heart, nothing you read or listen to is going to stick. One cannot reason one's way into a loving relationship with God -- I know, I tried. One must simply say "Ok, I give up, I give you my intellect, my heart, my emotions, my soul, my life," and one's paradigm will shift.

All of a sudden all those works that did nothing to build my relationship with God started...building my relationship with God. Instead of reading from a skeptic's perspective, I read from a believer's perspective and everything made sense.

In any case, if you do want to try to reason your way back, start with Edward Feser then move to Stanley Jaki's Cosmos and Creator, while interspersing G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and Heretics. This represents a cross-section of high-level material on metaphysics/Thomism, cosmology and scientific methodology of the universe, and modern philosophical/theological reflection on religion, respectively. You could also read Aquinas' Summa summa and Augustine's Confessions, as well as Boetheus' Consolation of Philosophy. I found Confessions to be particularly compelling as a skeptic / agnostic who was fighting internally.

Edit: I forgot my favorite blogger / sci-fi writer / ex-militant-atheist-turned-Catholic John C. Wright.

Your mind needs a break. You have to allow yourself to take one.

I get the exhaustion. I struggled with faith vs. atheism but eventually had a spiritual/emotional experience that convicted me in holding fast to my faith. But years later I encountered materialist philosophy and my world was rocked. So as you mention, I was missing a logical link. I just finished Robert Spitzer's "The Soul's Upward Yearning". It's one of the most comprehensive books I've ever read on the evidence/clues for our transcendent nature. Edward Feser's "The Last Superstition" is good too.

But even if you don't read those....know at a basic level that atheism/materialist/eliminative materialist philosophy has a veritable s***-ton to answer for and are not nearly as strong of positions as they make themselves out to be. Catholicism is unique in that it has a robust philosophical root going back to Aristotle/Plato. Give your head a break, let your heart talk to God and give it a go when you feel ready again. Faith is a gift, remember that. You have to ask for it.

Drops a truckload of Trent on you

Jokes aside, the Catholic Church has the advantage of writing down basically everything she's ever done, so you can look to those sources for details on what she says (like the Papal Bull Ineffabilis Deus which declared that Mary's Immaculate Conception was to be held as doctrine).

However, popewords can be hard to understand, especially if you don't have a background in Thomistic thought, so there are other books that may interest you, perhaps conversion stories like Rome Sweet Home and No Price Too High - it's interesting to see the similarities and differences between their paths.

For details on what Catholics believe, there is the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church which is written in a pretty easy language, with lots of references.

There's also the various creeds, of which my personal favorite is the Athanatian Creed which goes into so much detail on the Trinity that we've had very few Christological heresies since.

If you're interested in a non-Catholic take on the history of early Christianity, which was written against the New Atheism, you may like Atheist Delusions - if you want someone to absolutely demolist the New Atheists, you're looking for The Last Superstition, which is also a good introduction to Thomism.

I should also warn you that Catholics believe that baptism by beer is invalid:

>447 Since as we have learned from your report, it sometimes happens because of the scarcity of water, that infants of your lands are baptized in beer, we reply to you in the tenor of those present that, since according to evangelical doctrine it is necessary "to be reborn from water and the Holy Spirit" [ John 3:5] they are not to be considered rightly baptized who are baptized in beer.

If you want to understand our Mass, you can watch this 2 hour video about the Latin (Extraordinary Form or old, Tridentine) Mass, much of what is said will apply to the newer OF.

I can recommend some books.

For general theology:

• Being, Consciousness, and Bliss by David Bentley Hart
  
  
• On the Divine Names by Pseudo-Dionysius
  
  
• This argument and this other argument, which are some of the best out there for God's existence
  
  
• Summa Theologica by Aquinas
  
  
• The Last Superstition by Ed Fesser
  
  For living a Christian life:
  
  
• Way of the Pilgram
  
• The Life of Moses by Gregory of Nyssa
  
• Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom
  
  
• The Brothers Karamozov
  
  
• Centuries of Mediations by Thomas Trahearne
  
  For adjudicating between denominations:
  
  
• The Orthodox Way by Timothy Ware
  
  
• The Story of Christianity by David Bentley Hart
  
  
  Some essays and blogs:
  
  
• A blog, Glory to God for All Things
  
  
• Some essays, "Christ and Nothing", "Gods and Gopniks", "Daniel Dennett Hunts the Snark", and "Why Don't We Believe in Fairies"
  
  
  Do you need a denomination? Yes. All truths cannot be equally valid; therefore, some denominations must be closer to the truth than others. In the end, Christ teaches that the Church will be preserved throughout history. The question to answer for yourself is: what is the true Church? Obviously, I'm Eastern Orthodox and am convinced my Church is the fullest expression of Christianity, so read my comment as being spoken by a person from a particular group who has his own biases. Feel free to check out Orthodox Christianity if you start looking our way.
  
  Edited

I first began writing in 2013; having this idea of sharing political themes that I wanted to express in my writing and I quite liked the idea of becoming an author . . . but I got scared of failing. Tried reading quotes, reading philosophical books from one of my favorite philosophers, worked on political studies in college since it's my major, and thanks to suggestions from friends I came up with a 6-part book idea. To start it off, I began with the outlines, the socioeconomic landscapes, the details of the individual religions of various societies, how "race" relations occur, and the magic system of each society. This was all done after research into different philosophical systems (basically, certain real world philosophical systems are given the veneer of religion in my story to depict them), certain science videos I enjoyed (helped with certain ideas on my magic system), certain political beliefs in real world countries from either the past or present (my major is Poli Sci), and I tried to create fictional characters more attuned to real people than metaphors for certain beliefs.

To gain better criticism, after receiving fairly positive feedback from close friends and family, I decided to publish a snippet here and got pretty negative feedback ranging from people demanding my character needing to be a stereotype (which I tried to avoid) to criticism that my story was flat boring.

After spending nearly all of 2014 writing a 30,000 word background on the life of a Lore character who will be important later in the middle of my series, I began writing the actual main story as of 2015 and happily edited and re-edited the conversations and geopolitical landscape to suit my intentions on the two main characters. Unfortunately, I feel as if I'm putting too much emphasis on one and not enough on the other main character. I tried uploading a snippet of chapter 1 here and wow did I get negative feedback again. Almost nothing positive was said. In particular, /u/WarBuddha made it pretty clear that he thought I was being pseudo-intellectual since I tried to incorporate real world Zoroastrianism. To my surprise, people don't actually know that GRRM and other authors already did this in their own stories by reading into Zoroastrianism as I have. Regardless, my story beginning with a political parade and the background dialogue of the President explaining the history of the country was also received negatively.

So then, I began a side project to denounce New Atheism as a form of Atheist extremism because of the denial that they're hating on Muslims through the repeated vilification in western media of Islam being a supreme threat to human societies - they continue to deny this despite saying Islam is the greatest evil in the world. I self-published that book, amazon.com/Fallacies-New-Atheism-discrimination-pseudo-intellectualism-ebook/dp/B00U5010MC/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1425233260&sr=1-1 and then learned that people don't really want to listen to facts, history of different societies, economic realities, and figures; especially not the so-called Science loving atheists. So that ended-up being a total bust too. I tried marketing and that failed since there's no demand for my book.

So now, I've come to understand that even should I self-publish my unfinished fictional novel . . . there might not be a market or early adapters for it. In fact, I doubt anyone will care and I seem to be bad at promoting it anyway. So I've written 40,000 words in total for the Lore and first book with no real chance that I'll ever make any sales or money because nobody really cares about getting into political themes in novels not involving evil rich people as a plotline or murder and sex as with game of thrones.

Now, I've come to the realization that I've totally failed in all my endeavors and I have no real hope that anything will get better for me. In the end, that's that. I'll continue to write my novel but I have a huge confidence issue that it'll ever be anything but mediocre nonsense in the eyes of the mass public. Maybe that's all it really was too. I'll try to self-publish the first book at some point in the end of this year but I have doubts that I'll do well.

Personally, I think I became atheist around age 8 and I can't remember what happened then, so I can't say anything useful from a first-hand perspective.

For debunking the concept of gods, have a look at Loftus' Outsider Test for Faith, I suppose. It's a little bit confusing because you asked about the concept of gods in general, but if you're Christian you don't believe in the concept of gods in general, you believe in a specific god. Loftus makes a good case that odds are that your specific god is nonexistent. He's a bit wordy.

As for not looking for a debate, have a look at Everybody is Wrong about God by Lindsay. He talks about what people want from a god in practice. It's mostly noncognitive, so debates are literally irrelevant.

I agree with other posters that Darwin isn't particularly relevant. I'm told Catholics believe in evolution, so apparently evolution doesn't matter much.

I'd like to ask a Christian at some point about how they maintain belief in the Bible. Is it inerrant, or is it half metaphor, and how one reconciles the idea of God being Good with the other evidence at hand, that sort of thing. This is separate from the project you have in mind. You said you aren't interested in "attacks" on the Bible, but if you are willing to have that conversation, let me know.

Edit: On second thought, no, let's not have that conversation. You did an obvious argumentum ad populum in this comment elsewhere in this thread

>Secondly, if it was so simple that this all-loving creator should step in to avert disaster and he obviously isn't doing so (according to our observable understanding of "obvious"), why are there so many people that believe in it, and insist that it is a loving creator?

and I don't have patience for people who spout obvious fallacies. Most people in the world think Christianity is false, so argumentum ad populum works against you if you use it. Popularity of a belief is driven by numerous things unconnected with the truth of the belief.

This objection you've brought up is not new. For a detailed introduction to Classical Theism, I would recommend Edward Feser's The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism. Feser also has a post on his blog that talks about this, although the post assumes the reader already knows some fundamentals of Classical Theism that you may not know.

Another good thing to check out is this blog post on the Aristotelian Argument for the Existence of God. In short summary, if we admit that there is an "unmoved mover" or purely actual actualizer that sustains everything in existence at any given moment, then we must also attribute what Scholastics have called the "divine attributes" to it - that is, it is immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, fully good, omnipotent, intelligent, and omniscient. The arguments for why this is the case build upon each other and take a lot of reading to understand, so that's why I recommend checking Feser's books out, since he often writes with an atheist crowd in mind.

If we work from the Scholastic conception of God, that rules out many possible religions, such as paganism or Eastern religions like Hinduism. It doesn't, though, prove that there is any divine revelation, however looking at the attributes which we can philosophically discover about God, the only revealed religions that make the most sense are Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Deism could also be an option, although it depends on which variation you're talking about (the clockwork god of the Enlightenment thinkers would not fit make sense in a Scholastic framework). From that point on, I would say only other kinds of evidence, whether historical or experiential or otherwise, can bring one to believe that God has revealed Himself somehow.

Fuentes is good for some things, like fighting SJW's. He's well-meaning when he defends his Catholic faith, but definitely isn't that competent at it. He's more well-read on political philosophers (he even states this in his earlier vids), so like many, many young Catholics he has a lot to learn about his face on a philosophical and theological standpoint to better understand and defend it. This is not to say that he isn't worth listening to, just to be aware of his strengths and what he needs to work on (of course what's stated above is my own observation; you may think differently).

I haven't read every comment directed to you, but if it hasn't been listed I'd say look at these to become a staple in your "spiritual warfare toolbox":

• Purchase a rosary. I got mine at ruggedrosary.com. Learn how to say the rosary and try to incorporate it every week for a month then daily the next (like a spiritual/praying workout). Get it blessed by your local priest.
  
• Purchase a scapular (various colors means different things). Get it blessed by your local priest.
  
  Books/Lit (if you have the funds):
  
  
• Bible (I suggest the Douay-Rheims or Knox translation)
  
• Baltimore Catechism
  
• The Last Superstition by Ed Feser
  
  Also, read/listen to stories about atheists who turned Catholic:
  
  
• John C. Wright
  
• Leah Libresco
  
• Holly Ordway
  
• Jennifer Fulwiler

It's important to be able to stand up for the Church, so you need to learn history and apologetics. This book points how indefensibly silly New Atheism is. Don't be afraid to ask particular questions on here as pretty much every accusation that can be leveled against Catholics has been used on reddit. Take whatever good things your oldest demands and show them how the Church nurtures them and maintains them. If he wants freedom, teach him of the slavery of sin.

Pray for strength, knowledge, and patience. It's your demonstration of Christian love that will be the greatest help in bringing them back to life. Otherwise you leave it to the Spirit to call them back in time.

Ohhh, I thought you were someone else. Anyways here read this

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525
(you can find an ebook version online easily)

TL:DR - Objective Good exists and it is God. This is proven and demonstrable through logic and reason.

You exist and you can become a child of this goodness if you so choose. This is fulfillment and meaning as a human being and we exist to enjoy this infinite Truth and Love. We aren't aimless creatures mere byproducts of chance but divinely created beings loved immensely.

>I've downloaded CS Lewis' Mere Christianity maybe this will help.

This is a pretty decent and easy to read introduction to Christianity as a whole, so good start!

>Also, for someone who is at times skeptical regarding deities. How can I cement my faith once and for all?

Cementing your faith will never be a single irrefutable argument; It's more of a process than anything else. However, if you're looking to approach God from an intellectual standpoint, then Edward Feser is a great contemporary philosopher and writer. His book The Last Superstition was my introduction to the intellectual support for God and my first real dive into realism.

>I'd like to know what being a good Catholic is all about. Like what can I do today to be a better Catholic?

I don't have a specific book off the top of my head, but I'm sure someone else here can point you in the right direction.

I am in such a relationship at the moment. My advice: make it clear that marriage is not an option if you don't reach an agreement in regards to this matter, and set some physical boundaries. I hope you really love this guy, because these relationships are not easy. The level of physical intimacy between Christians and non-christians is quite different and you'll probably have to figure that out. I'm still trying to do that.

It sounds like unfortunately he's got a bad case of New Atheism, which is philosophically bankrupt. The people he's reading are routinely mocked in all serious philosophical circles by philosophically inclined atheists and theists alike. The question of God is not one which even in principle could be proven with empirical evidence. It is a question squarely in the domain of philosophy. If you want to give him a good dispelling of that give him this. At the very least after reading that hopefully he can come up with some better arguments.

I don't know what sort of christian you are, though I'm assuming you're a protestant. I have had the honor of witnessing several non-religious people began converting to Christianity recently. In my experience at least they tend to go for more of the High Church, Eastern Orthodox, some Roman Catholic, perhaps even some Anglo-Catholics, though I personally don't know any. If he finds your version of Christianity lacking, and feels like he wants to delve into these things deeper, consider suggesting the resources of these churches.

I am not asking you to try to convert him, I don't think you should try to convert anyone. St. Seraphim of Sarov said "Acquire peace and thousands around you will be saved". But do not gloss over this issue. You don't want a marriage where you disagree on these things. Make finding agreement a necessity. That means either he converts or you apostatize. I wouldn't recommend the latter (unless it meant conversion to Orthodoxy!), but I don't know if you've changed your views in your past. My relationship exists in part because I did convert from something, namely Evangelical Protestantism to Holy Orthodoxy, and so I knew my worldview was subject to change, and my girlfriend also has had her views changed before. We are also both philosophy majors so we can pretend we're equipped to deal with these things. I do not know your situation, your grounding in theology, or your philosophical or theological background, nor his. If you are not well grounded this might be a great opportunity to learn more about your faith.

I wouldn't recommend sweeping it under the rug. You need to learn how to discuss this respectively (I've been trying to learn that myself), but this has to be a conversation you guys have. If you don't it's going to bottle up and lead to problems later. You don't have to talk about it all the time, and that's difficult to do, but don't totally avoid talking about your faith. It's a tough thing to do but it's necessary.

God bless, it's a difficult thing but speaking for my own case, it's worth it. You have to examine your case and see if it's worth it for you though. This is a very difficult situation. All I'd say is don't take it lightly.

You're welcome! Another piece of advice I have is that while I firmly believe conversion is a result of grace, breaking down intellectual barriers to belief is absolutely critical for many atheists. I found I had a lot of baggage and bad history/bad philosophy in my overall worldview previously. I didn't know what I didn't know or believe in. To me, God was a silly, antiquated idea used for control and comfort. Things like classical theism, divine simplicity, act/potency, essentialism, forms, four causes...were either completely foreign to me or unintelligible.

The first part of getting past that was classical philosophy, as I previously mentioned. I don't just mean Catholic thinkers like Aquinas either (though he's the mastermind!). It was studying the metaphysics of Aristotle, the forms of Plato, Ockam's pre-nominalistic, how enlightenment philosophers shifted the thinking towards epistemology and metaphysics; that I think really broke those barriers for me. It turned out that the materialism, reductionism, naturalism, and empiricism that I took for granted...were not on the strong ground I thought they were. Indeed, philosophers like Ed Feser, David Oderberg, Peter Kreeft, GEM Anscombe, Roger Scruton, Bernard Lonergan, James Ross, and even Thomas Nagel (himself an atheist!) have been articulating strong arguments against those things for years. I never knew the power of logic, deductive reasoning, and philosophy. I took the view of scientism as the default truth without ever challenging it. But just knowing how strong the intellectual arguments are against atheism/materialism are, and for theism; has helped immensely in growing in God's grace. And that is to say nothing for my moral realism, courtesy of Alasdair MacIntyre and C.S. Lewis, that was the initial crack in my previous worldview.

For those of us who are more head than heart, like I suspect you and your wife are, this kind of deep dive into philosophy is a crucial aspect of conversion. If you can articulate the strength of theism and weaknesses of atheism from just a purely intellectual standpoint, you may at least get her to be more understanding of your shift in thinking. I think reading this book is a good start and that this one is slightly more thorough. Feser isn't the world's greatest philosopher but he is very articulate. This book of his helped me greatly in beginning to solidify and defend my own epistemology and metaphysics.

By far, the only book I've ever read that makes a good case for theism without doing any of the stupid things evangelicals do (references to evolution, the Bible, etc) is The Last Superstition. It serves as an introduction to the thought of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and really shows how badly Dawkins' screwed up the arguments for the existence of God. From very reasonable starting principles, it argues up to God and immortal human soul with absolutely no reference to divine revelation, any specific religion (except two short pages where he explains how the resurrection could be defended). While it didn't turn me into a theist, it did give me some good food for thought and, quite frankly, I can no longer call theism irrational.

After that, try out Reasonable Faith by William Lane Craig; it's considerably weaker than Feser's book, but I appreciate that Craig steers clear of any form of ID (in fact, his fine tuning argument may directly contradict it), and all five of his arguments for the existence of God are logically valid, which leaves you free to ponder over whether the premises are true or not.

Secondly, I would recommend checking out some of the individual arguments for theism, apart from any specific book. CS Lewis is weak IMO as an apologist for theism, but his argument from reason is interesting and worth thinking about. It is expanded in book form here by Vic Reppert. I also made a quickie infographic on it. I also recommend checking out the First Way of Aquinas (see my infographic), partially because it is a lot stronger than atheists seem to think, but MOSTLY to compare to Dawkins' treatment of it in The God Delusion, where you can hopefully clearly see that he hasn't bothered to actually look into it and his confirmation bias is now crystal clear to me.

I read his book a long time ago and thought it was great. I don't know what he's like as a debater but from memory, his book was solid. If you're looking to check out apologetics "from the other side", I'd also recommend Feser's The Last Superstition. I haven't read it yet but it's well-known in Catholic circles to be one of the best books written against atheism (tied for #5 on our sub's top 20 books). Someone also recommended this book to me recently, you might want to check it out.

You're right to an extent. My view is that your husband is spouting the typical atheist mumbo jumbo that you find too much in here (and elsewhere). The atheist position does incur the burden of proof despite what the "weak" atheists would like to believe.

But that doesn't mean that one cannot come to a rational reason to accept that God doesn't exist (or most likely doesn't exist). Here is one such method:

1. There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
   
2. An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
   
3. (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being.
   
   This is called the Evidential Problem of Evil by the atheist philosopher of religion William Rowe. This is not a rock solid proof of God's non-existence and there are other philosophical proofs that come to the same conclusions from different directions. However, you'll note that there are also no rock solid proofs of God's existence (though there are very strong arguments for God's existence). From my point of view, it seems things are at an impasse and one can find perfectly rational reasons to accept that God does exist and perfectly rational reasons to accept that God does not exist (and, further, perfectly rational reasons why we cannot have any rational reason to believe in the existence or non existence of God, to boot!). Confused? I know I am and I suspect a lot of other folks are far more confused than they either know or will admit.
   
   I'm a bit concerned that your husband has bitten off on the /r/atheism style of thought that are proudly (sadly?) on display in many responses to you in this very post. That would be a shame, but it's very common. I can tell you this if your husband has gone down that rabbit hole, there is no amount of arguing with him about God's existence that is going to change his mind. It'll only make him resent you and it will make him consider you stupid and he'll be able to make your life quite miserable. That's the fact of the matter, the typical internet atheist has a massive superiority complex and considers even the slightest wavering from the atheist dogma to be an indication of mental retardation.
   
   So how would I approach it? That's a tough one. NOT through anger or guilt trips (a la "you committed to a Christian relationship and are backing out without my consent") or debates. Maybe try a simple discussion. Hear him out with a willingness to really listen and absorb all of his thoughts on the subject. Just hear what he is saying and try to understand where he is coming from. That, at least, is a good start and it generally is worthwhile for any time your marriage gets a bit rocky. If you're lucky and if your husband is truly a good person, he'll come around to being open to listening to why you believe what you believe. So now would be a good time to start brushing up on that. From the sounds of it, your days of lackadaisical acceptance of Christianity are behind you. There are plenty of resources for you to learn about how a belief in God is rationally justified. Here are a few books and websites that you might want to start reading:
   
   

• Reasonable Faith
  
• On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision
  
• Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
  
• The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
  
• See what kind of thinking you're up against from this blog post
  
  Anyhow, I can't imagine that this is going to be a lot of fun for you any way you slice it. You can at least mitigate the pain by not playing the hypersensitive christian part that he is being indoctrinated that all religious people are. Stay rational and loving and caring above all else and demand that he do the same. You can work this out, but it'll take effort from both of you.

So I only saw one other guy give you apologetics material, and another person made the point that life is pointless if there is no God (which I agree is true).

But you're asking for intellectual material.

I would start with Dr. Edward Feser's Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide). It's $12 paperback on Amazon, $5 on kindle if you have a kindle-enabled device.

After this, if you find yourself convinced, I would go with The Last Superstition by the same man, for $15 paperback on Amazon or $12 on kindle.

Next, you can read excepts from the Summa Theologiae at your leisure for free on http://www.newadvent.org/summa/.

If you're very intellectual, Ed Feser's book Scholastic Metaphysics can really get you into Thomism after you've done the above, or you can pick up some MacIntyre.

I lost my faith as a Protestant and spent a while as an agnostic/atheist before becoming Catholic. My advice would be to really work at keeping an open, receptive mind and a real desire to know the truth. A little prayer wouldn't hurt either -- whatever you can muster, even to the God you're not really sure exists. Christians believe that Truth is a living person and He's reaching out to you. If you are seeking Truth, you will find Him.

I don't know if you're a reader, but a book that helped me immensely was Orthodoxy. It's G. K. Chesterton's recounting of his transition from agnosticism to Christianity. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Chesterton will change your life. Another good book --the best modern refutation of atheism -- is The Last Superstition by Ed Feser.

Edit: typos

What would an "effect" look like to you? Are you chasing after a feeling? I'm going to repost something I already posted today:

> In the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that we do not change God through our prayers; rather, by praying, we “obtain what God has appointed.” Basically be the change you wish to see and use prayer to find out what that change is.

Also if you are curious about strengthening your faith I always recommend this book. Be warned, there is some HEAVY metaphysics in there.

Thanks for saying so. First, Intellectually for skeptics to go from non-belied to from/theism, Dr. Ed Fesers books are a great start. Particularly this one.

The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587314525/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_HPddAbGK6PB6R

The book goes through how superficial many arguments against God are. They are like speed bumps. If you slow down, you'll find they really don't stand up to scrutiny and are easy to get over.

Feser's journey was much like mine. He summarizes it in this short interview:
https://youtu.be/UaSSSst3JBo.

For Catholicism, Catholic Answers, Sensus Fidelium, Wcbohio, formed.org, churchmilitant.com, Bishop Barron, EWTN, AskAPreist, r/Catholicsm and many others. I was a total skeptic so I watched many debates which you can find on protestant channels like Dr. James White. Everything I found historically and logically supports that Jesus actually founded the Catholic Church on the office of Peter, with apostolic succession. Good ole Pope Francis is 265 down from Peter. Popes are servants, not rulers and there were some bad Popes in history. They never corrupted the official teachings though. The first followers smelled like fish and a few were former prostitutes. We've been making His church look bad from the beginning. One should focus on the Doctrines, not the sinners who run the Church.

I think you would be well off to read some solid theology and philosophy.

The Last Superstition by Edward Feser changed my life. Until I read this book, I always struggled to harmonize my faith with reason. Feser showed me how. https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525
He also runs a blog: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/?m=1

Fr. Thomas Joseph White is a terrific teacher of the faith in the Thomistic intellectual tradition. His book The Light of Christ will explain some of the fundamental Catholic dogmas. https://www.amazon.com/Light-Christ-Introduction-Catholicism/dp/0813229715

Here are some works that might interest you: (Introduction wise, not as a systematic defense)

Plantinga, Alvin. God and Other Minds. Cornell University Press, 1990.

Feser, Edward. The Last Superstition: a Refutation of the New Atheism. St. Augustine's Press, 2011.

Plantinga, Alvin. Knowledge and Christian Belief. Eerdmans, 2015.

Pitre, Brant. The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ. Image, 2016.

Feser, Edward. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Ignatius Press, 2017.

10 second simplified/short version:

1.) Theism is almost certainly true. (See Feser and Plantinga)

2.) Christianity best fits #1. (See Plantinga and Pitre)

It's good that you're considering both the material and immaterial aspects of that with which you're surrounding yourself.

In addition to Kreeft (whose books I've also found helpful, btw), I highly recommend Edward Feser's blog and books.

Feser is a Catholic philosopher who writes about religion, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics and a lot of other things from a traditional perspective, and he's really well informed on modern thought and culture (his background is in analytic philosophy). His style is really fun but his arguments are rigorous.

I'd say more, but this is already starting to read like an advertisement...

I just can't stress the importance of being well informed on the intellectual merits of the Catholic faith (and theism in general) when studying at a secular environment. A lot of the intellectual attacks against our faith will instantly lose their efficacy when we realize that the people making them have no idea what they're criticizing.

Because the concept of god meets a deep psychological and social need that some people have. They have not been given other tools on how to meet that need. If you disturb anyone's source to meet a key need they have, they are going to be upset, whether its something basic like, food, water, shelter, or something more internal, like the concept of god.

I recommend instead to focus on what that person's need is, and try to address that. Is it a need for meaning or importance? Is it a need to belong to a group or a defined identity?

I also recommend the book, Everybody is Wrong about God, which goes more in depth on this exact topic. It is written by James Lindsay, with a foreword by Peter Boghossian of "The Manual for Creating Atheists" fame.

https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Wrong-About-James-Lindsay/dp/1634310365

Personally, I like the guy, and he and philo12 are pretty much my favorite atheist posters on r/debatereligion and r/atheism respectively.

To each their own, I suppose.

edit: Funnily enough, I actually have one of Feser's books ordered from amazon... should get here in a few days.

Hey, sorry I never replied to this! Aquinas is who I read, primarily. And the philosophers in his tradition who come after him. I think he probably presents the strongest arguments, but to consider them for what they actually are, you have to have a basic understanding of Aristotelian metaphysics. You're probably not looking for this, but I would recommend these books, in this order:

The Last Superstition

Aquinas (A "Beginner's" [quotes mine; not all that beginner-ish imo] Guide)

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction

The first one is a polemic, so beware. But it lays out a pretty decent modern cultural context for Scholastic metaphysics. That last one is especially good if you're interested in how science plays out in Thomism. The second one (and the bulk of the last one) though is kinda meaty technical stuff. But I think that series prepares you to understand the arguments of all different sorts of metaphysicians quite well.

It is a lot of work though. I won't deny that. It sort of pissed me off at first, but truth doesn't necessarily have to be easy to comprehend. Of course that's not to say that the difficulty of all this is meritorious or anything in itself.

For Atheism:

1. Superstition in All Ages by Jean Meslier - a comprehensive treatise against religion, written between 2 and 3 centuries ago.
   
   
2. The Religion Virus: Why we believe in God by Craig A. James - explains how religion and particularly belief in God is due to memetic evolution.
   
   
3. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification by Michael Martin - a comprehesive overview of arguments for and against the existence of God.
   
   
4. Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett - explains why the idea of evolution is so powerful an explanation of things, it acts as a universal acid against supernatural beliefs.
   
   
5. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - specifically addresses the idea of God as a supernatural creator
   
   For Christianity:
   
   
6. The Five Great Philosophies of Life by William De Witt Hyde - covers Epicureanism, Stoicism, Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity, explaining the value in each.
   
   
7. Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas - a comprehensive and detailed examination and defense of Christian beliefs
   
   
8. The End of Religion: Encountering the Subversive Spirituality of Jesus by Bruxy Cavey
   
   
9. Unspoken Sermons by George MacDonald
   
   
10. Descent Into Hell by Charles Williams - a novel

I discovered classical philosophy, which is to say the system of thought developed by the greatest of the pre-Christian, pagan thinkers of Greece (principally Plato and Aristotle), and refined and recruited into the service of theology by the greatest Christian theologians (principally St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas).

This system of thought was largely a given in the West in general until about the 17th century, and remains a given in much Catholic theology. It posits a basic metaphysics (i.e., a set of fundamental philosophical principles) without which it is exceedingly difficult to make much sense of anything at all. These principles are not simply asserted but rather are the result of a long tradition of careful reflection and refinement.

Among many other things, the classical philosophical tradition holds that three things quite pertinent to religion can be known with certainty by reasoned argument: (1) the existence of God, (2) some of God's attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity, and (3) the immortality of the soul.

If you spend some time reading Edward Feser you can get a fantastic and easy-to-read layman's introduction to classical philosophy. In particular he has two books for beginners, one non-snarky and one quite snarky.

Here. Read this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Superstition-Refutation-Atheism/dp/1587314525. Just do your best to get through it. It's an easy read, contains substantial philosophy, and I think it will really help. After you're done, come back here, and we'll talk about it. Don't throw in any towel yet.

Good answer, u/awoody87

u/newcommon , I just wanted to jump in and mention that Ed Feser's book is a great starting point for learning more about Aquinas and the existence of God: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314517/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220302362&sr=1-1

Regarding your other questions, please look up "compatibilism." This is the idea that there is no inherent contradiction between human beings having free will and God having complete sovereignty. It's a bit much to get into here, but plenty has been written on it.

If you have any further questions please don't hesitate to either ask more or PM me directly.

Well for one thing they don't believe in a literal bearded old man in the sky. But if you're actually interested, you should probably read some books written by intelligent, well-educated religious people that address exactly these sorts of issues. The Catholic philosopher Edward Feser's book The Last Superstition is a good place to start.

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One objection that can be raised against full-blown Cartesian dualism, with a material, mechanical body interacting with an immaterial soul, is that it seems to violate the law of conservation of energy, since for the body to act upon the soul or the soul to act upon the body would require a transfer of energy in or out of the material universe.

But I don't know if you can make the hylemorphic conception of the soul understood without first explaining how everything is a union of matter and form. We don't live in a universe made up only of matter with we humans having something extra called a soul, everything has a form and the soul is ours. Edward Feser builds up from this metaphysics to the existence of the soul in The Last Superstition, with competing views attacked in the last two chapters. For arguments at a more academic level, check out the work of David S. Oderberg, particularly "Hylemorphic Dualism". If you're in it to win it, see Oderberg's monograph Real Essentialism, or Feser's Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, which has apparently made Stephen Mumford realise he was a Scholastic realist without knowing it.

I know that few will thrill at the prospect of studying metaphysics at that level, but I do think it's important for evangelisation since so much unbelief proceeds from this fiction that what happens at Mass, for example, could in principle be more accurately described in terms of chemical interaction between atoms without reference to abstractions like religion, history, music, or people. So for those of you who are still discerning, please think about a vocation as a philosopher.

For a slightly challenging but enjoyable assessment of Thomist philosophy read "The Last Superstition" and/or "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide." They're both by an extremely intelligent Thomist, Edward Feser.

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469425497&sr=1-1&keywords=the+last+superstition

https://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851686908

There's the Ordinatio, which I believe is a revised version of his commentary on the Sentences. That's probably his main work. Then there are a few lectures, disputed questions, the questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics, and the Paris Reportatio (lectures recorded by his students).

You can find some of these titles here, though they're fairly expensive: https://www.franciscanpublications.com/collections/john-duns-scotus

The following contains excerpts mostly from the Ordinatio I believe and would probably be the best intro volume: https://www.amazon.com/Duns-Scotus-Philosophical-Writings-Selection/dp/0872200183/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=john+duns+scotus&qid=1556720505&s=gateway&sr=8-1

Selections on ethics: https://www.amazon.com/John-Duns-Scotus-Selected-Writings-dp-0199673411/dp/0199673411/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1556720505

Collection of Quodlibetal Questions: https://www.amazon.com/God-Creatures-Quodlibetal-Questions-Princeton-dp-0691618038/dp/0691618038/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

A portion of the Ordinatio: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823270734/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_7?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1

The following book is good about clearing up some caricatures and misunderstandings of Scotus by certain Thomists and postmodernist theologians: https://www.amazon.com/Postmodernity-Univocity-Critical-Account-Orthodoxy/dp/1451465726/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1556720505&sr=8-11

You might also check out this blog on Scotus: http://lyfaber.blogspot.com/

A recent work by David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God is well worth reading (it is more philosophical than its title lets on).

Ed Feser's The Last Superstition is good and I would also recommend his Scholastic Metaphysics.

Edward Feser is the author you're looking for. He's a philosophy professor who converted from atheism to theism due to purely logical reasoning.

You can read his conversion story here, it's definitely worth reading.

I suggest you either get his book The Last Superstition or Aquinas. Both are relatively clear and easy introductions to the proof of the existence of God formulated by Thomas Aquinas, along with the metaphysical background.

If you don't want to buy/borrow/pirate these books, you could also check out this lecture Feser did (he starts talking at 2.20).

If you don't want to spend an hour listening to the argument he puts forth, you could also check out the subreddit /r/cosmologicalargument, see here for an index of the posts explaining Thomas Aquinas' "First Way".

Of course neither of these last two options is an adequate alternative to reading a real book, but if you don't want to read a book, they're better than nothing.

The book The Last Superstition covers it pretty well; arguments against the theology and philosophy therein can be made, but they're much better made by people like Friedrich Nietzsche than by Dawkins.

Far too many people want to cite the "Sokal Squared" affair as evidence that gender studies and related fields are nothing but ideologically motivated hackery.

That may be true (and there are certainly some cases where it is), but their success in publishing papers is stronger evidence that you can find a journal that will publish something, given enough time and effort.

Edit: I looked deeper into Lindsay's other work. This is one of his major books: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Everybody-Wrong-About-James-Lindsay/dp/1634310365

From the Amazon blurb:

> With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

What fucking planet are these guys on? I've read Boghossian's absolutely terrible Manual for Creating Atheists, and it's page after page of intellectual flatulence followed by assertion after assertion about theistic arguments and claims. Neither Lindsay nor Boghossian show the slightest signs of grasping basic philosophical issues.

Check out Pints with Aquinas by Matt Fradd. Haven't personally listened to it but his podcast comes highly recommended by a plethora of users here.

A good book that goes over this stuff, among other things, is The Last Superstition by Edward Feser.

Here is a quick and basic rundown of multiple arguments for God's existence with Aquinas's Five Ways in here as well. Breaks it down very well, in my opinion.

Ed Feser's books are great:

The Last Superstition, or "Why he's wrong."

Aquinas, or "Why we're right."

And Scholastic Metaphysics: An Introduction, or "As close to the truth as we can get without Revelation."

> how are you so convinced that thre is a god ?

Philosophy. Here some books that I like a lot about this issue:

[Does God Exist?: A Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas](
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621641333/ref=sxbs_sxwds-stvpv2_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=6375e697-f226-4dbd-a63a-5ec697811ee1&pd_rd_wg=RledB&pf_rd_r=1S1ZT5JJ1SD3SV9MRNQP&pf_rd_s=desktop-sx-bottom-slot&pf_rd_t=301&pd_rd_i=1621641333&pd_rd_w=nu3hq&pf_rd_i=null&pd_rd_r=a9353d2f-9342-4b0e-a7a9-95c2236ae9e5&ie=UTF8&qid=1543491584&sr=2)

[Five Proofs of the Existence of God](
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621641333/ref=sxbs_sxwds-stvpv2_2?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=6375e697-f226-4dbd-a63a-5ec697811ee1&pd_rd_wg=RledB&pf_rd_r=1S1ZT5JJ1SD3SV9MRNQP&pf_rd_s=desktop-sx-bottom-slot&pf_rd_t=301&pd_rd_i=1621641333&pd_rd_w=nu3hq&pf_rd_i=null&pd_rd_r=a9353d2f-9342-4b0e-a7a9-95c2236ae9e5&ie=UTF8&qid=1543491584&sr=2)


The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

I'll have to check those out. I would also want to throw
http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Superstition-Refutation-Atheism/dp/1587314525 into the ring as well as Reasonablefaith.com. I don't always agree with doctor Craig (his stance on morality is pretty lack luster) but I do think he makes a good defense of Christianity in general.

It's called essentialism, it goes back to antiquity and has undergone a huge revival in contemporary thought (it arguably never left). It was the prevailing thought prior to the "enlightenment" literally forming the basis for the natural sciences and the rationale behind taxonomy. It can go by other names like real essentialism, neo-Aristotelian essentialism, new essentialism etc. and is related to Thomism, Aristotelean metaphysics, scholasticism et al.
Some contemporary authorities on the subject include Kripke, Oderberg, Putnam, Edward Feser (that's where I got the Tarzan example from).
Once you wrap you head around the history of philosophy and metaphysics this shit will blow your mind. There's a lot of heavy lifting involved but a good intro starting point would be the last Superstition by Edward Feser, it appears as a theistic apologetic and is quite polemical at the beginning but once you get into it it's probably one of the finest introductory books on the subject.

I recommend you check out Ed Feser's Five proofs of the existence of God, his Aquinas, or his The last superstition. Additionally, Bishop Barron has some good videos on the subject.

I would start with Edward Feser's introductions to Aquinas.

1. Aquinas: a Beginner's Guide- https://www.amazon.com.au/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Guides-ebook/dp/B00O0G3BEW ; and/or
   
2. The Last Superstition (this one is a bit polemical, so one will have to be charitable if one is an unbeliever, though one will likely enjoy it if one is a believer) https://www.amazon.com.au/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+Last+Superstition&qid=1568081318&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
   
   If you're a total newbie, this should serve as a good launching point to begin to study Aquinas himself. There are of course more thinkers than Aquinas (I'm very partial to Anselm over Aquinas in many matters), but the skills and habits of mind you acquire in understanding Aquinas are useful for reading other thinkers in the tradition.
   
   
   There is of course also no substitute for getting to know your pagan philosophers, in particular Aristotle and Plato. Try Aristotle's Eudemian ethics or the Republic by Plato.

http://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851686908

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Superstition-Refutation-Atheism/dp/1587314525/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y

These back the bases for the existence of God and are foremost in Catholic philosophical thought. Read these before anything else in this thread. As someone with an interest in Catholicism as yourself, if you go on /r/Catholicism, this is what will be recommended to you.

>i make time for my degeneracy. 1.5 hours before bed every night of whatever i feel like. chips or video games or weed or beer or porn or something. helps keep me working hard from morning til night.

That's what I told myself before I ended up hunched over every morning in a pool of my own vomit. It wasn't 'til I sobered up from constant weed and porn use that I realized I was wasting my life and destroying my brain (and dick) in the process. I have started the road to recovery and you may have things more under control than I did, but I found that returning to Catholicism from a decade of atheism is what helped me recover from my despair.

In any case, I'd look into C.S. Lewis, GK Chesterton, Dr. Edward Feser (if you're looking for proof of God from a philosophical standpoint, he does a good job of explaining Aristotelian metaphysics and debunking Dawkins-tier atheism in this book), other Christian apoligists and philosophers of which there are many.

If you aren't looking for fancy-pants academic writing, i'd go for Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton first. I haven't read it yet but I've heard good things about it. It may be a little sappy for this crowd though so there's always Nihilism: The Root of Revolution in the Modern Age by Fr. Seraphim Rose, a firebrand Orthodox priest and also an ex-atheist.

Talking about Ben Shapiro and religion: today on his podcast he recommended a book called The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism.
Has anyone read it?
Who knows, maybe he is preparing for a conversation with Sam (contacted by Dave Rubin maybe).
Sam retweeted this about Ben a few days ago.
I would love to hear a conversation between the two.

I would recommend that you get him Dr. Feser's book The Last Superstition https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/product-reviews/1587314525/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar which would be the first step in getting him into the faith again.

Catholics do not believe in blind faith, we believe in faith informed by reason.

The scientific method ("replicable and testable evidence") is not always the appropriate method to use in seeking knowledge. It works for that aspect of reality that is material and quantifiable. For other aspects of reality, we must use other methods, such as mathematical or philosophical reasoning. Arguments for the existence of God are mostly of the latter type.

Or in other words, read this.

You should find an ebook of this sometime. It would help out a lot of your questions and conceptions about Christianity I'm sure https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525

Thank you again. It sounds like I should combine that work with this one, since the latter one seems to be more introductory than the former.

> Can you enlighten me to the introduction to the subject?

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ

Enjoy it.

> Oh? When you were asked to prove how eternal torment was justified through temporary discipline, you called it an analogy.

Oh God...

I didn't call it an analogy. Read more carefully, please. I used an analogy to point out how naive it is to claim an immaterial existence is torment in itself. The torment isn't punishment, but a consequence of how you chose to live your material existence. For instance, if you indulge too much in food or sex, you'll have a hard time living an eternal life without that. Is it really that hard to understand?

You might want to try The Statistical Theory of Everything: It Explains Everything and is Never Wrong, available for free on Amazon.

>this is your mantra to anything that happens in the world that is either good
>or bad:
>It is an inevitable consequence of the bell-shaped curve of a normal
>distribution.

If you want a good history of philosophy with responses to basically everybody, Fr. Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy is pretty good.

Here's the first volume: https://www.amazon.com/History-Philosophy-Vol-Pre-Socratics-Plotinus/dp/0385468431/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579301&sr=8-4&keywords=frederick+copleston

Edward Feser deals with both the New Atheists, Enlightenment thinkers, and Old Atheists in The Last Superstition, Aquinas, and Neo-Scholastic Essays. Fr. Garrigou Lagrange's Reality is also worth it.

The Last Superstition: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579343&sr=8-1&keywords=the+last+superstition

Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851686908/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1543579366&sr=8-6

Neo-Scholastic Essays: https://www.amazon.com/Neo-Scholastic-Essays-Edward-Feser/dp/1587315580/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579366&sr=8-5&keywords=edward+feser

Reality: https://www.amazon.com/Reality-Synthesis-Reginald-Garrigou-Lagrange-P/dp/1477582401/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579439&sr=8-1&keywords=reality+garrigou-lagrange

Honestly, I tend to think Van Til's Presuppositionalism is a better system than a lot of Catholic philosophy. His book Christian Apologetics is probably his easiest to read, though I'll admit I've had more access to his ideas from his defenders than his actual writing: https://www.amazon.com/Christian-Apologetics-Cornelius-Van-Til/dp/0875525113/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579550&sr=8-1&keywords=christian+apologetics+van+til

In a less theologically charged but similar category are Alvin Plantinga's Where the Conflict Really Lies and Warranted Christian Belief: https://www.amazon.com/Where-Conflict-Really-Lies-Naturalism-ebook/dp/B005X3SAHY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579615&sr=8-1&keywords=where+the+conflict+really+lies+science%2C+religion%2C+and+naturalism

https://www.amazon.com/Warranted-Christian-Belief-Alvin-Plantinga-ebook/dp/B0059EQ4DY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1543579634&sr=8-1&keywords=warranted+christian+belief

The Last Superstition by Edward Feser is fantastic approach from philosophy.

Not to be confused with The Last Superstition, I'm sure.


I'm not sure what the point of the focus on Evangelicals supporting Trump is. They obviously support him for things beyond his sins. Are they telling him his sins are okay? It's like the hefty criticism won't be satiated until Trump's Evangelical base falls away.

There is loads of reasons to not like Evangelicals and I'm against them for a number of reasons but this one seems overblown. The dominant political and social views in the group are well known.

Save yourself a ton of time. this guy has done it for you: https://www.amazon.com/Anti-Bible-Atheists-Freethinkers-Christians-Better/dp/153055036X

>I, however, would love to see a genuine defense of the existence of a god who is a sick MoFo.

This book has some, in interviews with senior theists. I think ultimately the book fails but it was a good read.

Yes! The Last superstition by Edward Feser is a must.

Hap hap hello there! I am a bot and you linked to Amazon.

This comment contains 1 pricing graph(s)

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Product 1: The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (1587314525)

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Here is a good article on the topic. Feyer's book, 'The Last Superstition' goes into a lot of detail on it.

I think The Last Superstition by Ed Feser would be good for the first group.

There are quite a few that come to mind right off the bat.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Superstition-Refutation-Atheism/dp/1587314525

http://www.amazon.com/The-Dawkins-Letters-Revised-Challenging/dp/1845505972

http://www.amazon.com/Illogical-Atheism-Comprehensive-Contemporary-Freethinker-ebook/dp/B00D19LIVW

The first is written by Edward Feser, and manages to explain the mechanics of the Aquinas argument from the First Mover while providing some of his own polemical broadsides in return to Dawkins. This book was actually instrumental in my own conversion to Christianity.

The Second is a series of rather friendly letters which were written in response to Dawkins book which ended up getting put onto the old Dawkins website before he shut it down for getting out of control.

The third is a longer book which focuses on critiquing all of the major New Atheist arguments. Great price it comes from the perspective of someone who isn't even necessarily arguing for Christianity- but is simply pointing out all of the philosophical and logical holes in the emperors new robe.

Those are just the first three that come to mind. Ask if you want something a little more academic.

If you are not in the US you have to use your home countries amazon URL. In Germany it is:
https://www.amazon.de/Pragmatists-Guide-Life-Creating-Questions-ebook/dp/B079LRHPM7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518819434&sr=8-1&keywords=the+pragmatists+guide+to+life
Regardless of where you are based if you can't download it in your country go to the Amazon or Kindle link you would usually go to for your country, search "The Pragmatist's Guide to Life" and it should work.

empiricism implies that we cannot trust our brains. it eventually leads to reductionism (IMO) which implies everything can be (objectively) be boiled down to numbers as a final truth. its a very toxic and very new idea. when numbers become truth it has no other option but to turn society away from God (an atheist society is weak and foundationless) if you are really interested more about my viewpoints on this heres some reading that explains some of it better than i ever could:

https://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Foundations-Modern-Science/dp/0486425517


https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Society-Jacques-Ellul/dp/0394703901

https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525

https://www.amazon.com/Libido-Dominandi-Liberation-Political-Control/dp/1587314657 (this one is slightly less relevant but does go into how often empirical science's end goal is looking at humans as machines and how that is dehumanizing and controlling)

https://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Against-Modern-World-Julius/dp/089281506X

https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Slavery-Collected-Kaczynski-k/dp/1932595805/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=11DZHECERPHPBMFXWJKR

The Last Superstition by Edward Feser.

Feser used to be an atheist.

I'm willing to buy the book for you if you want it.

There are lots of arguments for God’s existence. Edward Feser is a good place to start: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism/dp/1587314525

He has a blog, too: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/?m=1

Edward Feser (book, blog).

"The Last Superstition" by Edward Feser? "The Existence of God" by Richard Swinburne?

The Last Superstition

The Last Superstition is probably what you're after.

See the following books:

Ed Feser's: The last Superstition

Trent Horn's: Answering Atheism

Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker's: Answering the New Atheism

The Last Superstition - Edward Fesser

You would have to look into Thomist philosophy to understand further implications:

http://www.schiffradio.com/pg/jsp/verticals/archive.jsp?dispid=310&pid=66973

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1587314525/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1587314525&linkCode=as2&tag=thomacom-20&linkId=CNONYXYP34KIE2CU

Have you read this book?

Scientist camels have been around for many years:

http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Camel-Chronicles-Arguments-Non-Believer-ebook/dp/B0046A9K38/

http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Camel-arguments-observations-atheist-ebook/dp/B0056BOUW2/

http://atheistcamel.blogspot.com/

For canadian customer