Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is unknown or unknowable. Another definition provided is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist."
The Church of Scotland is the national church in Scotland, and one of the country's largest, with over 270,000 members. According to the government Scottish Household Survey in 2019, 20% of the Scottish population identified the Church of Scotland as their religious identity. The Church of Scotland's governing system is presbyterian in its approach, therefore, no one individual or group within the church has more or less influence over church matters. There is no one person who acts as the head of faith, as the church believes that role is the "Lord God's".
Robert Gordon Wilson was a Scottish politician and solicitor. He was the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) from 1979 to 1990, and was SNP Member of Parliament (MP) for Dundee East from 1974 to 1987. He was Rector of the University of Dundee from 1983 to 1986.
Michael Lou Martin was an American philosopher and former professor at Boston University. Martin specialized in the philosophy of religion, although he also worked on the philosophies of science, law, and social science. He served with the US Marine Corps in Korea.
Ray Comfort is a New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist who lives in the United States. Comfort started Living Waters Publications, as well as the ministry The Way of the Master, in Bellflower, California, and has written several books.
British society is one of the most secularised in the world and in many surveys determining religious beliefs of the population agnosticism, nontheism, atheism, secular humanism, and non-affiliation are views shared by a majority of Britons. Historically, it was dominated for over 1,400 years by various forms of Christianity, which replaced preceding Romano-British religions, including Celtic and Anglo-Saxon paganism. Religious affiliations of United Kingdom citizens are recorded by regular surveys, the four major ones being the national decennial census, the Labour Force Survey, the British Social Attitudes survey and the European Social Survey.
Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Samuel Benjamin Harris is an American philosopher, neuroscientist, author, and podcast host. His work touches on a range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and is known as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
The Free Church of Scotland is an evangelical, Calvinist denomination in Scotland. It is the continuation of the original Free Church of Scotland that remained outside the union with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland in 1900, and remains a distinct Presbyterian denomination in Scotland.
The Center for Inquiry (CFI) is a U.S. nonprofit organization that works to mitigate belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal and to fight the influence of religion in government.
Richard Cevantis Carrier is an ancient historian. He is long-time contributor to skeptical websites, including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs, Carrier has published a number of books and articles on philosophy and religion in classical antiquity, discussing the development of early Christianity from a skeptical viewpoint, and concerning religion and morality in the modern world. He has publicly debated a number of scholars on the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity. He is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works. Carrier's methodology and conclusions in this field have proven controversial and unconvincing to most ancient historians, and he and his theories are often identified as fringe.
The God Delusion is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist, and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's statement in Lila (1991) that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion." In the book, Dawkins explores the relationship between religion and morality, providing examples that discuss the possibility of morality existing independently of religion and suggesting alternative explanations for the origins of both religion and morality.
Letter to a Christian Nation is a 2006 book by Sam Harris, written in response to feedback he received following the publication of his first book The End of Faith. The book is written in the form of an open letter to a Christian in the United States. Harris states that his aim is "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms." In October it entered the New York Times Best Seller list at number seven.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is a division of Center for Inquiry (CFI) founded by British biologist Richard Dawkins in 2006 to promote scientific literacy and secularism.
Matthew Wade Dillahunty is an American atheist activist and former president of the Atheist Community of Austin, a position he held from 2006 to 2013. Between 2005 and October 2022, Dillahunty was host of the televised webcast The Atheist Experience.
John Carson Lennox is a mathematician, bioethicist, and Christian apologist originally from Northern Ireland. He has written many books on religion, ethics, the relationship between science and God, and has had public debates with atheists including Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
The term Wee Free was an epithet commonly used to distinguish two Scottish Presbyterian Churches after the union of 1900: The Free Kirk and The United Free Kirk. Since the United Free were approximately 25 times larger, but hard to distinguish without some knowledge of Scottish history and theology, the rhyming Scottish diminutive became used as an epithet of the post 1900 Free Kirk. The epithet Wee Free was also applied to a small group in the 1918 Liberal Party who on principle did not want to go into coalition with the Conservative Party. The Wee Free Liberals either did not get, or refused, the coupon signed by David Lloyd George of the Liberals and Bonar Law of the Conservatives. The Wee Free in modern usage is used, usually in a pejorative way, of any small group who because of their, arguably obscure, religious principles choose to remain outside or separate from a larger body. A Wee Free attitude might show as a preference for being part of a smaller but ideologically sound group rather than a larger compromised one.
David Wood is an American evangelical apologist, social critic, philosopher and YouTube personality, who is the head of the Acts 17 Apologetics ministry, which he co-founded with Nabeel Qureshi. He also runs Foundation for Advocating Christian Truth, which is the organization behind AnsweringMuslims.com. Though covering a range of topics, he is known for his criticism of Islam, particularly Islamic views on theology and morality, as well as the Quran in general, hadith, sīrah and Muhammad.
God's Not Dead is a 2014 American Christian drama film directed by Harold Cronk and starring Kevin Sorbo, Shane Harper, David A. R. White, and Dean Cain. Written by Cary Solomon and Chuck Konzelman from a story they co-wrote with Hunter Dennis, and based on Rice Broocks' book God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty, the film follows a Christian college student (Harper) whose faith is challenged by a misotheist philosophy professor (Sorbo), who declares God a pre-scientific fiction. The film was produced by Pure Flix Entertainment in association with Check the Gate Productions, Red Entertainment Group, and Faith Family Films, and released theatrically on March 21, 2014, by Freestyle Releasing.
Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer. Dawkins himself has stated that his political views are left-leaning. However, many of Dawkins's political statements have created controversy among left-wing and atheist communities.
