Marchesk

So professional philosophers do agree with the contention that humans aren't very good at it?

I'm asking whether rational though qua philosophy is harder than in fields like math or physics, which people generally acknowledge to be challenging ...

My personal observation on forum philosophizing is that any thread on any topic of good length will involved a lot of shifting terms and adjusting the...

So philosophy is harder than math or physics.

But we're able to determine progress in math or the sciences. The who is the human race. Our collective effort at philosophizing, with professional ph...

Reminds me of NY Times article on Wittgenstein's philosophy. The author wasn't sure whether Witty was right or not, but he thought professional philos...

The mistakes they make when philosophizing. Ability to correct our mistakes over time. Is literature a field that progresses? I don't think it's the g...

Yes, although I've read where the Churchlands have said there aren't any propositions in the brain, excepting the ability of the brain to produce prop...

Good question. Someone like Meillassoux would say we do with math. We are able to model things black holes and the inside of atoms without being able ...

My understanding in critiquing it is that there are fundamental categories of thought we can't escape, or check the world against to see whether the w...

Then why couldn't humans be the same way? I'm not saying we shouldn't be free to choose coffee over tea, I'm saying we shouldn't be free to poison the...

And what's wrong with that? Isn't that what it's like for God? A perfectly good God has no free will to do evil. I don't see the inherent value in bei...

But let's revise the argument a bit. Say that for God, the good is pleasure, and evil is suffering. God is a hedonist. So then we can ask whether an o...

Evil is behaving selfishly, harming others, manipulating them, exploiting them, discriminating against them, causing them to suffer, etc. Are you real...

Not being able to name the good seems like a small price to pay for not having to suffer.

All that's fine and dandy, but then why would the theist call God, "good", since being good is based on our conception of good and not God's. You can'...

This is deserving of it's own thread.

Wouldn't' there be all sorts of things going on beyond our light cone that are completely unknowable to us? But astronomers are confident the universe...

Maybe part of the problem was that Kant promoted fixed, fundamental categories of thought in response to Hume's radical empiricism instead of a more f...

What that implies is that the world is equivalent to our conceptual schemes, which would seem to mean that science can't work.

The truth is somewhere in the middle can also mean truth in that situation is not a binary proposition.

The problem isn't assuming that God would do things we don't understand. The problem is when you combine an omni-good god with the existence of an imp...

But if the argument can't show what the good reasons are, then why isn't the argument flawed? The argument is assuming there is one. That's because we...

And what are those good reasons? You just stated that God must have a good reason, but it can't be known by us, which seems like a huge cop out.

Or the concept is simply flawed, resulting in defenders of it claiming that we mere mortals can't know. It's really suspicious that the argument ends ...

When it comes to God, the question is why evil would ever need to be justifiable. The FWD is that the existence of free will does this, but God's omni...

I don't think evil is defined as justifiable. We might agree that sometimes war is necessary and therefore justifiable, but it's still evil. It's just...

Couldn't this line of reasoning be used to justify any action? It's the ends justify the means sort of morality. Genocide isn't evil if it leads to so...

That's certainly true.

Another thought occurred to me. What makes us think a computer simulation is the best that advanced civilizations could do? Maybe they would consider ...

It seems the reasoning for assigning probability for being inside a simulation is based on the actual universe outside the simulation. But if we're in...

Is it that we're too dumb, or that we're motivated by something other than being good philosophers? I can't recall which radio program it was, maybe S...

Have you started a thread on this before? Because I think you're probably right. I've seen in myself and plenty of others, not just in online forums, ...

That is an interesting and a bit unusual argument. I recall a Christian explaining to me in college how the Garden of Eden was a setup. God wanted Ada...

Omniscience means to know everything. What exactly is meant by knowing all things is debateable, but non-believers did not' invent the term. Wouldn't ...

And this all came about because believers claimed that God was so and so. Atheists didn't invent omniscience or the perfectly good. The FWD exists bec...

In that case, we wouldn't call God perfectly good, would we? God could be perfectly evil from our point of view, but perfectly good from God's. Maybe ...

I don't know. Did God say he was perfect, or did human beings come up with that?

Why suppose he is perfectly good, though?

Imagine an argument justifying war is that although lots of evil comes about, some people show incredible bravery and sacrifice. The courage and love ...

I don't think free will justifies the existence of evil, regardless. Not for a perfectly good God. A different sort of God, sure. Basically, you have ...

Which goes to the question of why God created Lucifer in the first place. Is free will supposed to be something that God cannot know about in advance?...

Agreed. There should be a way to tell whether a life form or biosphere was intelligently designed or the result of natural processes. What's the count...

I don't consider that to be love, but it's a semantic disagreement. I don't think something can be love if it's absent the feeling. I understand that ...

So I act well toward person A because I really like them and enjoy their company and value them as a person. But I act well toward person B (okay mayb...

Also, I'm like 99.9% certain that cities and genetic engineering are not topics of biological evolution. Also, I'm like 99.98% certain that nests and ...

It would be nice if we could will ourselves to love the people we don't love. But it seems the best we can do is choose to act humanely toward them, d...

So humans are naturally selected to manufacture medicine to prevent natural selection from selecting against some of us, just like spiders are natural...

It doesn't prevent natural selection, but it does change the outcome from what natural selection would have selected. Human interference isn't natural...

No doubt it's beyond my limited ability. But giving birth to more empathetic humans is only part of it. Another part of it is having an environment th...