AOF Activities & Events

Ah yes, the moral compass. Religious believers challenge us on it. Yet the most shocking deeds of the "Grabber in Chief" glide blithely past the Evangelical base. How does that work? Do they value loyalty above fairness? Or maybe it's the "abortion bargain" -- it's all OK as long as President Trump packs the Supreme Court with anti-choice justices. Hmm.

Sacramento State University philosophy professor Matt McCormick will delve into this remarkable conundrum, analyzing human cognitive biases, fallacies, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and the epistemology of conspiracy theories, with special attention to how these problems manifest in the political environment of the Trump era. Reasoning mistakes are not confined to the "Right," of course. Admit it, liberals are not intrinsicly better reasoners or less biased than conservatives. But some psychological features of folk in the current conservative base might make them susceptible to the manipulations that have contributed to the rise of ... what we have today.

Dr. McCormick has worked extensively on atheism, the philosophy of religion, and critical reasoning for decades. His published works include Atheism and The Case Against Christ (Prometheus Press 2013), and many articles on atheism, disproofs of God's existence, and the epistemology of religious belief. More recently, he has been teaching inductive logic, critical reasoning, and exploring the philosophy of artificial intelligence. His YouTube Channel includes his Philosophy of Religion course and other lectures, and in his blog, he discusses a wide range of issues related to atheism, belief in God, and artificial intelligence (link: ProvingTheNegative.com). He wrote an entry on atheism for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and is an amateur robot builder/hacker with a fully functioning, screen accurate R2D2. (He has not yet built a killer robot.)

The AOF Speaker Series is pleased to present this exceptional speaker.