The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioural and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and athe...

It’s perhaps something of a surprise that almost none of the so-called New Atheists has anything to say about arguments for God’s existence. Instead, they do tend to focus on the social effects of religion and question whether religious belief is good for society. One might justifiably doubt that the social impact of an idea for good or ill is an adequate measure of its truth, especially when t...

Descartes, in the Meditations (1641), notes that "there are only two ways of proving the existence of God, one by means of his effects, and the other by means of his nature or essence.” (AT VII, 120). The latter, a priori path, represented paradigmatically by the Ontological Argument of Saint Anselm (and its offspring, including Descartes’s own version), has perennial appeal to a certain sort o...

Atheists sometimes use Bertrand Russell’s teapot argument, and its variants with other objects in place of the teapot, to argue for the rationality of atheism. In this paper I show that this use of the teapot argument and its variants is unacceptably circular. The circularity arises because there is indirect evidence against the objects invoked in the arguments.