Wayfarer

Illuminating response!

I don’t want to try and persuade you, but suffice to say that this is just what was called into question by modern physics. Einstein asked his friend ...

Not. Two of the pioneering popular works of philosophy of science in postwar Britain were by James Jeans and Arthur Eddington and they both had a deci...

Well, yeah, but then you’re of a generation where this has become evident. I bet, you being the same person, and this conversation being conducted som...

Sure. It’s more a reflection, aimed at knocking a bit of the taken-for-grantedness off the world we live in, the notion that we have it all worked out...

What I was trying to explain to you is that the topic you've raised was the subject of a debate that went on for centuries in theology - not only Chri...

Not at all. Computers rely on discoveries made in quantum physics in order to operate at all. And computers are indeed 'special', they are one of the ...

It's not so simple. Many great minds, Feynman's included, have been baffled by the discoveries of quantum physics, and it's still a great unsolved que...

That was what mainstream scholastic theology argued. It was called ‘intellectualism’. The position you’re arguing from is that of ‘voluntarism’ which ...

You know, I think I agree with that. Actually, more to the point, modern physics, on which the success of modern computers rests, is itself magical. I...

Islam and Christianity are both theistic religions. What's the difference?

I have worked in AI and use it every day, and this is not an accurate depiction of AI. Human beings have the capacities they do as the result of milli...

right. You know, there is also a 'religious left'. They don't make nearly as much noise, they're usually busy helping out.

Reading it again - it's one of the letters of Paul, who was, of course, setting up ('empowering', we would say) all of these congregations around the ...

I'm sure there are many that are, because of their willingness to believe. That's a drawback about doxastic religion (i.e. religion based on belief). ...

You're right, I went back and searched again, and couldn't find that etymology.

Going back to that Ben Sasse article that started this discussion: It's been shocking to see how many purported 'Christians' have gone about wailing f...

They call themselves Christians but really it's a degenerate form of Christianity.

My view is that suffering is an inevitable aspect of life , and so the question is, 'why?' Life can seem dreadfully unfair, and even for those in fort...

I think it was Chesterton who said that people tend to believe in something - so, in the absence of religion, then all kinds of substitutes will flour...

He did correct the title. And you're missing a full stop. The reason you can't use ungrammatical English is because it's an illegitimate use of langua...

I think there are, or I hope there are, decent republicans. And I also hope that not all who identify as 'evangelical' are evil and/or stupid, althoug...

:ok:

Emphatically disagree. When I look out the window, I see the same things that everyone else does. Depending on what I'm seeing, and how others around ...

those reports seem entirely consistent with Trump's other actions to overturn the election. If he coulda done it, he woulda done it. Now, the Senate i...

No, it's much broader. It's a series of essays by and about many different people. You can see the ToC in the link. I only mentioned instrumentalism b...

we need to be very careful about these mix’n’match ideas. Buddhism and Greek philosophy have some things in common, but they’re also literally worlds ...

When Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were debating their discoveries in atomic physics - you may recall they were basically the founders of modern at...

It seems a sound definition to me.

you do realise that this proposition actually says a lot? That the connection between logic and reality is a deeply contested issue in contemporary ph...

There's what's beyond logic, and there's the simply irrational. People confuse these two all the time. I think that both the Platonist tradition, and ...

aha! Thanks, it was the one feature I could never figure out. Couldn't see it for looking :meh:

This is an important point - according to M A GIllespie, Theological Origins of Modernity (review here), this conception of God as being completely ab...

I have encountered reference to the term 'Kalaam cosmological argument' in Internet discussions, only now I learn that 'kalaam' refers to Islamic scho...

It was not in a legitimate grammatical form. A legitimate form obeys the rules of grammar, and the title 'What it's "Legimacy"' does not. I thought it...

Still can't figure out from this how the @mention function works. If I enter @, it appears as plain text, not as a hyperlink to that username.

'Legitimate' literally means 'lawfully born' More broadly, means 'fixed in law' or 'recognised within a legal framework'. It can therefore be both a m...

Thread title makes no sense and is grammatically broken.

Yes, it is a feature of love, and no, there is not a material explanation for it.

isn't this a version of the Kalaam cosmological argument?

The issue is that scientists can't identify the cellular mechanism that provides the timings - the internal clock. Nobody would dispute that all these...

Note that in the article, that the original experimenter, Frank Brown, was shunned by the scientific community and it was declared that his findings m...

Everything that lives on the Earth - so far as we know, that’s everything - is obviously conditioned by the natural cycles of days, years and seasons,...

Our bodies perform the most amazingly intricate things every moment without our awareness. I don’t think that oysters opening and closing in time with...

I’ve used ‘Circadian’ as a forum name in the past. It’s a lovely word.

Imagine if one of those girls that Carroll photographed was, say, 3 months under the age of consent - 16, say. Then photographing her would certainly ...

that's a great article. I didn't finish it all yet, but it seems that it still remains a mystery, does it not? The book it is abstracted from also int...

I'm saying that the physical domain lacks instrinsic reality. Put another way: the reality it has is imputed to it, or imposed on it, by the observer....

I learned from Lyall Watson's book Super Nature, that oysters kept in tanks in the midwest of the USA in old mines and in still water, still opened an...

I think the equality of beauty and truth belongs very much to the Platonic idiom. Plato, Phaedrus, 250d too impressed with the beauty of mathematical ...