The Wrong People Will Do Everything In

Naturalism Is The View That The Physical World Is A Self-contained System That Works By Blind, Unbroken Natural Laws. Naturalism Doesn't Come Right Out And Say There's Nothing Beyond Nature. Rather, It Says That Nothing Beyond Nature Could Have Any Conceivable Relevance To What Happens In Nature. Naturalism's Answer To Theism Is Not Atheism But Benign Neglect. People Are Welcome To Believe In God, Though Not A God Who Makes A Difference In The Natural Order.

Natural Selection Certainly Operates. It Explains How Bacteria Will Gain Antibiotic Resistance; It Will Explain How Insects Get Insecticide Resistance, But It Doesn't Explain How You Get Bacteria Or Insects In The First Place.

Constrained Optimization Is The Art Of Compromise Between Conflicting Objectives. This Is What Design Is All About. To Find Fault With Biological Design - As Stephen Jay Gould Regularly Does - Because It Misses Some Idealized Optimum Is Therefore Gratuitous. Not Knowing The Objectives Of The Designer, Gould Is In No Position To Say Whether The Designer Has Proposed A Faulty Compromise Among Those Objectives.

Because We Don't See The Evil Destroyed Now And Thus Experience The Suffering That Evil Inevitably Inflicts, We Are Tempted To Doubt God's Existence And Goodness.

I'm Not Saying That Atheists Can't Act Morally Or Have Moral Knowledge. But When I Ascribe Virtue To An Atheist, It's As A Theist Who Sees The Atheist As Conforming To Objective Moral Values. The Atheist, By Contrast, Has No Such Basis For Morality. And Yet All Moral Judgments Require A Basis For Morality, Some Standard Of Right And Wrong.