Yes, I think this is an important question. The issue of miracles as evidence for religious claims is a fascinating one. But I wonder if there really can be an event that we could have good reason to believe violates the laws of nature. David Hume explored just this question in his little essay "Of Miracles" in the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), and I tend to agree with his conclusions, though sometimes I still wonder. Here's the thing suppose the Pope started levitating. Why should that prove that his religious beliefs and claims are true? Why not conclude that he or someone else has discovered a way to produce levitation using the laws of nature? You see, in the case of any observed event, X, we can either choose to think there's a supernatural cause or a natural cause. Just because an event is extraordinary, like levitating, it doesn't follow that there's a divine cause. There may well be a natural cause that we just don't know about about, a causal sequence we don't...

I remember once posing the following question to a class I was teaching: if we take the religions of the world, isn't it true that at most one can be right and that perhaps none are right? Every single student in the class answered in the negative, holding that all can be right. When I pointed out that such an option would violate the principle of non-contradiction in the sense that it would mean that both X is true and X is not true (where X is a religious doctrine, for example that Jesus is God). To my amazement, every student was comfortable with tossing out the principle of non-contradiction. At the time I figured that the event showed that people are more interested in moral and political practices of tolerance and even simple manners than with logic. But I later thought to myself that my students might be onto something about the curious way "truth" plays out in religious discourses. There may be a sense in which it's wrong to use ideas of truth and falsehood as they appear in the sciences,...

This is a bit more of a sociological or psychological than a philosophical question. My personal experience provides virtually no basis for knowing the answer. My guess is that, as with Copernicus, the proof would take some time to catch on. During that period we'd see a lot of people, particularly those heavily invested in religion, attacking the proof, attacking the person who invented it, and attacking those who accept it. There'd be fatwas against purveyors of the satanic proof; somehow it would be found to manifest the mark of the beast or correspond to some dreary prophecy in Revelation . Well scrubbed suburban homeschoolers would recite its flaws in between trips to the mall. A formerly unknown Danish newspaper would be catapulted to the center of the world's attention for publishing it and then be charged with racism for employing Arabic numerals in doing so. Pat Robertson would condemn the proof as another effort by the homosexual, secular left to undermine religion, morality, and...

It sounds to me like you're a something of a skeptic--resistant to dogmatism of any kind, whether theist, atheist, or agnostic. (Yes, agnostics can be dogmatic, too, holding dogmatically that religious questions can't be answered.) It also sounds like you remain, however, troubled by a persisting need to be dogmatic about something. Perhaps you can let go of that. Perhaps you might consider the possibility that there's something inherently unstable about religious dogmatics, or anti-religious dogmatics for that matter. Theistic/atheistic/agnostic alternatives seem to come and go in a kind of natural way to people (in a way that beliefs about ordinary, middle-sized, middle-distanced objects like tables and chairs don't). I find something of this in Hume, for example. You might try reading some of Hume' Dialogues concerning Natural Religion , as well as Montaigne's Essays related to religion, and Erasmus's In Praise of Folly .

This is an interesting claim. The tension, however, seems to rest on being able to "conceive" or "imagine" things that are impossible, such as breaking the stone paradox. But is it reallly possible to do that? Can one even conceive of forgiveness without things to forgive? If not, the "greatest being that can be conceived" is consistent with a being "limited" to being able to do only what is possible. Perhaps the misleading thing here is calling such a being "limited." Isn't being able to do everything logically possible just the same thing as being able to do everything?

A good and courageous question in my book. First, you should know that there are quite a few philosophers who have regarded Christianity as morally unsound. Nietzsche is perhaps the best known among them. For myself, I have argued that common Abrahamic conceptions of God are immoral (see "The Moral Imperative to Rebel Against God"). But your question calls for some qualification of its own: Don't assume that the Bible defines Christianity. It's true that some Christians hold that the Bible is literally true and inerrant in every statement and command. Most, however, don't accept this view of Scripture. Rather, they hold that some parts of the Bible are today inapplicable, other parts erroneous, and other parts metaphor, symbol, or fable (including the portions you cite). From this point of view, it's not the Bible that defines the Christian church but the church (or community of believers, anyway) that decides how to interpret and what to do with Scripture. Remember that in the early days...

Religion is a terribly important and interesting affair, isn't it. For myself, I'm a bit unsure about the "just" of your first sentence. I think that simply on empirical terms there can be no question that religion gives a sense of meaning to some people's lives. I have my doubts that religion is "just" or only that. I think that there are many, many (perhaps countless) factors that play into the existence and persistence of religion, among them a projection of parental authority, a desire to explain natural phenomena, an unwillingness to live with ambiguity or to accept human finitude, fear of death, compelling personal experiences, loneliness, custom, peer pressure, the instruction of authority figures, a need to come to terms with suffering, a desire to feel that one's own views are true and good, etc., etc., etc. You may be right about atheists and agnostics--that they lack some need that the religious have. But I also think that atheists and agnostics may simply find (or create) meaning...

You raise an interesting issue. At the outset, I'm afraid, I must say that much depends upon what in this sentence is meant by "knowable." On the face of it, however, the statement "X is unknowable" is paradoxical, even incoherent. To use the name or term, "X." meaningfully seems possible only if something is known about X. Still, it seems to make sense to say things like, "The velocity and position of an electron are unknowable" (by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle); "The temperature of every meter foot of atmosphere on the planet currently closest to Alpha Centauri is unknowable"; "The Power Ball number for the next lottery is unknowable today." "The last thought of Abraham Lincoln is unknowable." "The name of every human being is unknowable." Of course, none of these statements imply that nothing at all is known about the topics they address. We can know, for example, that the last thought that crossed through Abraham Lincoln's mind was a thought, that the Power Ball number will be...