Protestants and fundamentalists place an emphasis on fideism, in particular, which is the natural implication of Luther’s ‘salvation by faith alone’ F...
The other point about this is, only certain kinds of ‘evidence’ are credible in scientific method - reputable, third-party, and so on. You yourself mi...
Thomas was nevertheless an apostle of Christ. Bertrand Russell was a card-carrying atheist, judgement of the worth of his conception of what constitut...
I feel strongly that this is not the case. But - surprisingly - it’s a very controversial claim. I recognise the biological continuity of h. Sapiens a...
A STATEMENT BY FORMER REPUBLICAN NATIONAL SECURITY OFFICIALS https://www.defendingdemocracytogether.org/national-security/ 10 points about Trump’s inc...
You're a kind of anti-evangalist, right? I personally don't see 'religion' in terms of 'attaining positivity' (and I put 'religion' in quotes, because...
It has something to do with the ability to form memories. Without memory, there can be no continuity of process, and without continuity of process, th...
I work in software documentation, and I’ve worked at an AI startup. Computer systems are not minds, but large banks of electronic switches that proces...
That’s because in today’s world, the link has been severed. Knowledge is, as the New Left said, mainly instrumental - know-how, knowing how to achieve...
actually I was reading an excerpt from a book recently, about the fact that Plato takes issue with Socrates on this question. 'Acting against your bet...
In the cultural context of Buddhism - yes, certainly. One of the traits of the Buddha is 'yathabhutam', meaning 'to see things as they truly are'. The...
I think there's deep fallacy of equivocation here. First of all, go back to the origin of the philosophical term 'substance'. It means nothing like 's...
There is a factor that has generally been neglected in modern philosophy - in fact it can't even really be named, because there's no name for it. That...
The best-known quote is: But I think the tendency has been to forget this warning, and to assume that only those properties that are amenable to mathe...
I’m saying that rather than ‘theologically’, the word should have been ‘teleologically’ - although, as it happens, one implies the other, which is the...
Wrong word - teleologically, meaning ‘with purpose’. What happened with the scientific revolution was the abandonment of the notion of final and forma...
There's a good book, written around the 1980's, Paul Johnson Intellectuals. Read it years ago, can't remember much of it, but remember thinking it was...
I don't recall saying anything about 'God'. Anyway - with respect to the OP, I don't think that belief in God is in any way shape or form a scientific...
What it reminds you of, is your business. What you're saying is: be brave enough to be a nihilist: Comprehending anything, as distinct from merely rea...
If we knew of nothing that wasn't contingent, then we wouldn't know of anything contingent. Ships move relative to light-houses, but if light-houses a...
There's an old saying, 'familiarity breeds contempt'. It's applicable here. But it's not the silly parlour game of 'how do you know you know anything?...
Hey nice essay. That is well understood in many philosophies. Buddhism says not to mistake the finger for the moon. Plato’s dialogues likewise often r...
I never think about ‘what God might consider’. It seems thoroughly anthropocentric to think that way. Again, I don’t doubt of the fundamental facts of...
It was Galileo, Descartes and Newton who lead the way in the mathematization of nature. But it doesn't describe all of reality - only that which is am...
There’s a delicate issue here - belief vs doubt. First factor: in Western secular culture, there is an assumed opposition or dichotomy between religio...
Why is it advisable to exercise reasonable doubt? Because it's a fundamental aspect of knowing. Why seek to explain it? 'Reason is the source of expla...
What if 'the advantage of doubt' is that it simply leads to a coherent understanding of truth? I mean, if you go back to the Greek philosophers, they ...
Your thinking is still muddled. Doubt is not a biological adaptation in the sense that claws and wings are. You’re still treating it like it has to be...
From the Charles Khan article on the Greek use of the verb 'to be', cited Page 1 This conception was absorbed by (or taken over by) Christian theology...
Doubt existed a long time before modern scientific method. Those questions you ask about dogs and wolves were asked in almost exactly the same fashion...
Whitehead's 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' is about the tendency to reifiy ideas, to take theoretical abstractions as being real in their own rig...
I'm saying there are considerations other than survival. Don't you see how rationalising every human capacity in terms of its fit for survival basical...
H. Sapiens evolved, just as science outlines. But this kind of opposition between evolution v religion is itself a product of culture, not science. It...
'How things began' in scientific terms - your terms - comprises tracing efficient and material causes back to its purported beginning. How things bega...
Maybe. But you can see how this can easily be interpreted by positivism. And in fact, I don't see why the attempt to describe 'the essence of things' ...
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