Does the theological idea of an eternal God really mean a God that exists in time but merely has infinite duration? Or does it mean a God that's outsi...
I'm not convinced that the third sentence follows from the first two. Even if two individuals have an identical genotype, they aren't necessarily goin...
I wrote: "We were in Syria to help defeat ISIS, and now that ISIS no longer holds any territory and its "caliphate" has been erased from the map, that...
"What crime is he committing?" By refusing to sign an appropriations bill that doesn't fund border security? None. Certainly nothing more egregious th...
Logic, especially formal logic, is hard in the same way that mathematics is hard. It takes a certain kind of intellect to be comfortable with it right...
Regarding Mattis in politics, it's probably helpful to remember why he resigned. He resigned because the President wanted to withdraw a token 2,000 Am...
says: "No, just because I don't have an explanation of the physical universe it doesn't follow that my materialism posits a brute fact. And even if di...
I think that what this little exercise demonstrates, is that in some of the more politicized academic subjects anything will likely be accepted for pu...
I don't like combining threads because doing so damages the resulting mega-thread's continuity and flow. It makes the board more work for its readers....
asks: "In a sentence or two, what do you think it says?" As indicated in the precis of the decision, the Court's decision has three parts. The first t...
I think that the definitive statement on interpreting the meaning of the US 2'd Amendment might be the US Supreme Court's decision in DC v. Heller. ht...
says: Contrasting "faith in god" with "faith in the truth" already seems to embody an implicit claim that "god" isn't "truth" (or that a proposition a...
says: I agree. The question doesn't apply just to atheists, but to anyone who uses the word 'faith'. I can't speak for all atheists and I expect that ...
asks: That raises the problem of time asymmetry. Why is there a distinction between the past and future, in a way that there isn't for left and right?...
Purple Pond says: It's an interesting question. Thanks for starting the thread. There seem to be three different things mentioned there: 'supernatural...
Streetlight says: Why must atheists be indifferent? I'm certainly not, for at least two good reasons: 1. If theistic religious claims were true, it's ...
Michael says: Epistemology certainly seems to apply, at least if the faithful one is making propositional claims about what does and doesn't exist and...
S says: I am too, in some of my moods. Other times, I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic. That sounds like an expression of strong atheism. I sh...
I wrote: Michael writes: I'd rather not get into a pissing contest with you. I'm just pointing out that the problems of induction, confirmation, natur...
It certainly seems to be based on a whole lot of assumptions that haven't been conclusively nailed-down. Astrophysics certainly seems to make that ass...
Pattern Chaser says: "An atheist who asserts the non-existence of God is occupying a faith position, in exactly the same way that a believer who asser...
What kind of 'presentism' are we talking about here? In the philosophy of time, 'presentism' is the view that only the present exists. While the past ...
I support secularism and I don't personally like or feel comfortable with hard-core divine-command-theorists. But having said that, I think that many ...
I don't believe that the reason why so many people voted for Trump was that they thought that he was a traditional literary hero. (Is that why anyone ...
Philosopher19 says: "I see what you're saying. In order to better communicate what I'm saying, let's leave the concept of perfection for now and perha...
It might be more accurate to preface #1 and #3 with "A popular theological doctrine holds that..." So #4 would be dependent on the truth of that parti...
"In a nutshell, Descartes' cosmological argument for the existence of God stated that he had an idea of a supremely perfect being. Since he himself wa...
I think that we are our minds and personalities. I don't buy the view that we are something separate, ghosts-in-the-machine, a soul that rides around ...
I'm not convinced that religion has a single purpose. (Or a single definition, for that matter.) The 'primal' sort of religion seems to be about induc...
How does one quantify the 'size' of insults? By how inclusive they are? By how divisive they are? By how emotionally aroused we become? Part of the pr...
The first rule might arguably be, 'Treat the opinions of philosophers merely as suggestions for further discussion, not as religious-style revelations...
"The implication of indirect realism is that what we experience is a model of the world, not the world as it is." -- Harry Hindu My concern is that th...
"Growing block seems to adopt the worst features of both views. Not sure what problem is solved by the block history, but the lack of block-future see...
"lf plato thinks only philosophers should be kings then he probably didn't have any idea of democracy." --"TheMadFool" I think that Plato knew about d...
Here's my comments on your premises: P1. The worm theory requires that we are temporally extended beings. OK, I'll buy that. P2. if we are temporally ...
Does imagination play a role in philosophy? I'd say 'Of course'. We use imagination to generate examples, concoct problem cases, conduct thought-exper...
In my own thinking, the answer to the question "does a God exist?" depends on how 'God' is being defined, on what we are using the word to mean. 1. If...
I can't comment on the Simmel quote, since I don't know its larger context. He doesn't seem to be talking about money so much as about value. There ar...
I agree with Arkady that new religions are still appearing. There are lots of 'new age' groups and religious ideas that have emerged in the last few d...
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