BillMcEnaney

I don't want to hear myself talk, partly because I doubt I've found much wisdom. Although I love philosophy, I hate uncertainty. In his Skeptical Essa...

I understand, but what about Thomas Kuhn's scientific paradigms from his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Kuhn talks about normal science...

Wherever it comes from, it's teleological.

Thank you for correcting my mistake.

So, although the conceptual relations don't cause natural events, they describe them? I won't say that they entail them since you can break a law of n...

"Narcissism" and "arrogance" were probably poorly chosen words. So, I can see why they confused you, and I should think more carefully. But there's st...

My perspective has changed significantly because I suffer from two painful mental illnesses: severe clinical depression and emotional deprivation diso...

Some say laws of nature describe regularities, but descriptions rarely cause what they describe. Instead, we describe events because we discover them....

My question Is metaphysical, not linguistic. I want to know what a law of nature consists of. A regularity needs a cause, so I wonder whether that cau...

Thank you. I wish I wrote much better than I do, partly because I proofread scholarly Catholic books for Preserving Christian Publicans, Inc. When I a...

I don't want to debate anything, but here's Google's definition of a category mistake. It's "the error of assigning to something a quality or action t...

Oops, Grammarly must have replaced "contents" with "costs."

I specialized in logic while earning my philosophy degree, so I reflect on inference rules, the nature of induction, and more. That's partly why I men...

So, I allude to a law of logic when I say a baseball usually falls when I drop it? "Usually" suggests induction.

I hope I won't reason circularly when I say God causes people, places, and things by giving them existence, even if they've always existed. If I'm cor...

Thank you. I equivocated by mistake. I want to consider logical laws, but it's hard for me to know why we say "laws of nature" if those laws are non-c...

Maybe we need ro know what a law of nature is in itself to find out why those laws exist. One of my philosophy professors didn't understand the questi...

Feudalism was imperfect, and I reject Hitler's brand of it. Still, I admire Christendom in 13th-century Europe. So, please read The Thirteenth: Greate...

Maybe feudalism has some good points. For example, a feudal lord lived with people in a community and could explain their needs and concerns to the ki...

Tom, I believe in North American High Toryism, a Canadian. North American High Tories are monarchists who treasure history, tradition, wisdom from the...

I descended from Irish people and was born in the United States. I haven't emigrated to or from any country. Consider "African Americans." That phrase...

North American High Toryism is Canadian conservatism. You should read the Manifesto in Prof. Ron Dart's book The North American High Tory Tradition to...

I asked about causality because I doubt that there are brute facts. A brute fact is a state of affairs that can't be explained, even in principle. So,...

Would someone please tell me why there's causality when naturalism presupposes that causality exists? If I argue scientifically for something that sci...

Luther and the other Protestant revolutionaries fought against some awful abuses, simony, for example. In fact, Luther didn't expect to cause the spli...

Maybe insomnia is affecting me brain since didn't understand the joke. Year ago, after I vowed to be a lifelong virgin, I boarded a bus with another m...

Folks, please let me tell you a true story because it relates to sola scriptura helps explain why Protestants often disagree with Catholics. Years ago...

Wow, thank you for clarifying "being qua being."

Relativist, maybe I believe some things uncritically. But I believe what the Catholic Church teaches, partly because I study documents from the Early ...

Relativist, the Catholic Church doesn't require Catholics to be Thomists. So, if a Catholic disagrees with St. Thomas on some point, maybe that means ...

Hyper-pluralism explains why Dr. Allan Fimister and I think sola scriptura makes the idea of divine revelation seem absurd to secularists. When I reca...

Gregory, St. Thomas was an Aristotelian. So please tell us what Thomistic metaphysical theories he would revise or reject.

Maybe I'm biased. But you've just used "substance" in another sense. In the relevant Thomistic sense, "substance" means "essence." Since an essence is...

I'm not obsessed with anything. But I began this discussion because I believe that I've found some flaws in his theology. What about heresy? For a Cat...

I forgot to make an important point about Dr. Craig's Monothelitism. So I'll summarize it with a question. "Dr. Craig, how can Christ have a complete ...

I agree with you, Wayfarer. Maybe you've read some blogposts where Prof. Edward Feser answers Dr. Craig's objections to divine simplicity. Feser argue...

Now that I've heard Dr. Craig reply to Bishop Barron, I'm confused. Dr. Craig reminds us that councils teach that God is absolutely simple. But they d...

I don't beg the question by merely inviting you to entertain something to see what follows from it. So, after work, I'll argue against Dr. Craig's not...

No Catholic expects the Catholic dogma about God's absolute simplicity to convince non-Catholics merely because it's a dogma. But suppose that dogma i...

Relativist, Dr. Craig believes that God is simple. But he rejects the absolute divine simplicity that Catholics must believe in. For us, the doctrine ...

Maybe I should go into more detail about the first cause. Naturally, I know that there could still be other causes if God exists. So I granted that po...

In context, the first cause is the one that gives every other cause its causal ability. The first cause is the most fundamental one, the cause that ea...

Since I forgot the difference between a nature and an essence, I'll ask my friend Prof. Alexander Pruss to remind me of it. Then I'll tell you what he...

First, Jesus is not an essence. Neither is a horse. An essence is a group of properties that causes, say, a dog to be a dog, a tree to be a tree, or C...

Then please criticize my vicious infinite regress argument. Tell us what fallacy or fallacies I committed in in it. What premises false?

What kind and of skepticism does it lead to, Phyronism? I have no idea why you think it would do anything like that. From what I can tell, you probabl...

No, I'm to treating it as a dogma partly because no pope and no council can turn it into one. But about 62 Popes have endorsed Thomism and transubstan...

Again, "substance" means "essence." So what do you mean by "inside" when I'm not talking bout spatial relationships. I'm doing metaphysics instead of ...

Here's a startling article by Dr. Craig. I say "startling" because he believes the monothelite heresy is plausible when Matthew 26:39 contradicts it. ...

Slavery? Maybe I can see why you'd believe that. But the Catholic Church teaches that Christ is fully present in even the tiniest fragment of a consec...