Summary: Interview with atheist and Christian debunker John Loftus examines the philosophy of atheism. Alex Tsakiris: When we falsify this idea that you are a “biological robot”, and accept that’s absurd, and once we get past the idea that consciousness ends at death, which again, that’s where the evidence points, then a lot of things start falling differently in terms of how I orient myself to the world, how I orient myself to other people, how I orient myself to morals, purpose, meaning in life. You are not a biological robot, John. John Loftus: Okay. I disagree. I’ve said why. Alex Tsakiris: You say, “I am a biological robot. I am going to stand by that.” Right? That’s what you’re saying? John Loftus: Well, there’s no evidence for invisible beings, right? Entities. Alex Tsakiris: But you, as you live your life, you live your life like a biological robot? John Loftus: Everybody does. That’s all there is. Alex Tsakiris: Okay. John Loftus: Well, you have to look into the philosophical quandaries with trying to distinguish between mind and body. I mean, I taught the Introduction to Philosophy classes that you would probably be interested in looking at how they’ve tried to relate the mind and the body. They just really can’t do it. It’s really ludicrous to see how they do that. (interview transcript continued below) John Loftus - Debunking Christianity UPDATE: Follow-up Email Exchange (click here) Play It Listen Now: Download MP3 (64 min.) Read It: Welcome to Skeptiko, where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host, Alex Tsakiris, and this episode of Skeptiko is yet another in this series I’ve been doing on Atheism. Now I do feel a need to tell you a little bit about how I came to do this interview because, as you know if you’ve listened, you just heard a similar kind of debate with philosophy professor Dr. Stephen Law. Actually, these two interviews with Dr. Law and John Loftus came about as the result of my interview on Episode 217 with Gary Marcus, because Gary Marcus is this NYU professor of psychology, bestselling author, writes frequently on consciousness issues, yet if you listen to the interview you’ll hear how he stumbled with some basic questions about consciousness. And surprisingly—but I guess not surprisingly for me because I keep pounding on this drum— he is essentially Atheistic in his thinking. That is, academia is Atheistic. You go to a guy like Gary Marcus. He’s not waving the flag for Atheism, but you push through just a little bit and boom! There it is. The same kind of talking points parroted back to you that you hear from Atheists. So that led me to thinking I really need to revisit the Atheist proposition directly and establish a dialogue with some Atheists. The way that I often do that is I go to Amazon and I look for the bestselling books in the category I’m interested in. In this case it was Atheism. I came up with Dr. Stephen Law’s book and I also came up with John Loftus’ book. So it’s kind of a numbers game in inviting guests on. You don’t get everyone you ask. A lot of times I’ll go out with a couple of requests and hope to get one. In this case, I got both of them. I got one and then a week later John Loftus responded and said, “Hey, I missed the email but I’d be happy to do it.” So I felt obligated and I felt like there was enough of a difference between the two that I could pursue both of them. They really cover two different aspects of the Atheism proposition. One is the philosophy of science proposition that you heard from Dr. Stephen Law that I think doesn’t hold up very well. From the discussion we had, he doesn’t really come off as sounding like he has a very strong case. We’ll leave that as it is. And then the second is this religious thrust that you get from John Loftus, whose website is all about debunking Christianity. But as you’ll hear in this dialogue,
