Ian Kluge

Author's details

Name: Ian Kluge
Date registered: September 11, 2010

Latest posts

  1. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism Part Two — October 26, 2012
  2. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism (Part #1) — October 19, 2012
  3. Keeping the Baby — de Botton’s Religion for Atheists — July 16, 2012
  4. The God Debates #3: Fine-tuning God — February 29, 2012
  5. The God Debates #2: Theology Beyond the World — February 22, 2012

Most commented posts

  1. Keeping the Baby — de Botton’s Religion for Atheists — 125 comments
  2. The “New Atheism” 5: Meme Theory and HADDs — 21 comments
  3. The God Debates #1: Less Than Meets the Eye — 17 comments
  4. Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism (Part #1) — 16 comments
  5. Grand Design Part 2: Multiverses — 10 comments

Author's posts listings

Oct 26

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism Part Two

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Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism Part 2 of a review by Ian Kluge. Editors Note: In part 1, Ian introduced Alvin Plantinga’s important new book as follows: In his new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism, Alvin Plantinga shows how misunderstandings about science have led to what …

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6 comments

Oct 19

Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism (Part #1)

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Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism Part 1 of a review by Ian Kluge For almost two decades now, we have witnessed a spirited, at times acrimonious debate between the defenders of science who are generally new atheists and the defenders of religion who are usually, but not always, Christian. While some …

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16 comments

Jul 16

Keeping the Baby — de Botton’s Religion for Atheists

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Community, Identity, and Peace Alain de Botton plans to throw out the bathwater — but keep the baby. The author of  Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion thinks humanity will be better off if we toss the metaphysical superstitions encumbering all religions but keep the many insights and practices that …

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125 comments

Feb 29

The God Debates #3: Fine-tuning God

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Part 3 of a discussion and critique of John R. Shook’s The God Debates Let us look at one more example of Shook’s straw-man methodology. He says, “The basic ‘fine-tuning’ argument for god has this form: If god exists, then it is highly probable that this universe would permit life; The universe is organized to …

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1 comment

Feb 22

The God Debates #2: Theology Beyond the World

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Part 2 of a discussion and critique of John R. Shook’s The God Debates Behind the logical plausibility of God lies another argument Shook dismisses in The God Debates, namely, the “Theology beyond the World”(3) which argues that “god is the necessary condition for the universe, for its order, and for its intelligibility.”(4) He recognizes …

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4 comments

Feb 15

The God Debates #1: Less Than Meets the Eye

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Let’s start with the good news: The God Debates maintains a civil tone amid the often shrill abuse of the real-world God debates. Nothing like the late Christopher Hitchen’s somewhat hysterical contention that teaching children religion is equivalent to child-abuse;  no suggestion of Harris’s ominously totalitarian claim that even tolerating religious belief and freedom is …

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17 comments

Jul 01

Grand Design Part 5: The God of Science

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This is the fifth and final installment in Ian Kluge’s series on Hawking and Mlodinow’s The Grand Design. ————————————————————————————————— The reference to something transcending matter is, of course, a reference to God in His ontological fu nction i.e. God as the source and ground of being, not the “personal” God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. …

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6 comments

Jun 24

Grand Design Part 4: Doing Away with God

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This is the fourth in a series of commentaries on Hawking and Mlodinow’s The Grand Design by Common Ground contributor Ian Kluge. ============================== Doing Away with God Hawking and Mlodinow propose to do away with God as a necessary part of explaining the existence of the universe. They believe that the three “why? questions” (171) …

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5 comments

Jun 17

Grand Design Part 3: Model-Dependent Realism

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In this third part of my review of The Grand Design (Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow), I’d like to take a closer look at their theory of “model-dependent realism”(42). This is one of Hawking’s and Mlodinow’s main contributions in The Grand Design. According to this theory: a physical theory or world-picture is a model (generally …

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4 comments

Jun 10

Grand Design Part 2: Multiverses

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This is the second in a series of discussions of Hawking and Mlodinow’s The Grand Design. Today:  The Logic of Multiverses Multiverses are another source of logical difficulties for Hawking and Mlodinow. The Grand Design claims that the existence of multiverses can explain why the universe we inhabit is fine-tuned for life without resorting to …

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10 comments

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