Neither of those count as empirical evidence. I'm not being pedantic, or trying to dismiss religion as an evil or even a problem on account of its lac...
I read The Courage to Be about 40 years ago and i remember getting something out of it. As you probably know I am an atheist (in the soft sense of lac...
An unknowable divinity would seem to be useless to us. I don't believe religious folk are looking for an unknowable divinity?that would indeed be a pe...
Yes, I see no reason why science and religion must conflict. The important point for me is intellectual honesty on both sides. Science cannot answer a...
I'm making a modest claim that events make sense to us?that they are intelligible within the general frame of causation. What more could we expect? Th...
The world as it appears to us is obviously understandable. That is not so much a conceit of science as a fact of human life and science. When it comes...
I came across this interesting passage regarding the nature of faith, in a Wikipedia entry about Paul Tillich: Faith as ultimate concern According to ...
It seems obvious that there is a difference between a person who can act on their knowledge and the person who cannot. The salient question would seem...
Science begins with everyday observations about which we could all agree. Observations can be accurate or inaccurate, so science is correctable. Relig...
When it says stuff is it false or merely inapt? The word is used in many ways obviously. Usage presumably cannot determine whether something is real, ...
If the whole ambit of philosophy is human experience and judgement then is it not always a matter of "what can (coherently and consistently) be said? ...
I see you are taking the epistemological actuality of our predictive limitations as a guide for your disbelief in determinism. I, on the other hand, t...
Insofar as we are able to understand them events on the macro-level do not seem to be connected by chance. Events on the micro-level may be or it m ay...
And the same can be said of the verification principle. Anyway you failed to notice my point that reflection on and analysis of human experience and o...
Yes, not strictly justified by logic, since there is no logical necessity that events must have causes, or that particular causes or conditions must o...
The thing is that the positivist conclusion comes form reflection on human experience, knowledge and judgement, so it is , like phenomenology, not str...
Right?too many possible causes. Don't anomalies that are not understood invite investigation in terms of causal thinking? I'm finding it hard to think...
When they do not behave in the way we have predicted is it not due to unforeseen conditions which when discovered causally explain the anomaly? Over a...
Can you give an example of a stochastic cause? So chemical elements do not always combine in predictable ways? In the absence of understandable faults...
The observed invariance of chemical and electrical processes, which are what constitute everything we observe. We explain events causally not stochasi...
Genes and the pachinko machine appear stochastic, as does the coin toss, but I think we have reason to believe they are not really stochastic, and mer...
Right, religious faith is based on personal experience and culturally mediated interpretation of that experience. My whole argument is that personal e...
The determinism we witness in our macro-world may well be the result of stochastic processes at the quantum level, or what appears stochastic to us ma...
We live in a world of process, where all kinds of processes seem to invariantly give rise to other processes. We actually don't know of exceptions, so...
If the PSR is interpreted to state that every event must have a cause, then it would seem that the PSR does imply determinism. Is that how you are int...
I don't know what a productive discussion between religionists and secularists could look like. My only aim is to get a clear idea of what kinds of th...
Right, the unseeable is totally indeterminable. So, believing in the unseeable is believing in the indeterminable, which means the belief itself is wi...
You don't defend your views with argument, rather you quote those you consider authorities, constantly presenting (often the same old) excerpts which ...
When @"Wayfarer" is presented with arguments that refute his ideas and which he has no answers to he resorts to labelling them as "positivist" in an a...
To agree democratically to abolish democracy seems like a performative contradiction. When I elect a party different to the one you want I haven't tak...
Thanks for the 'nothing' reply. Even if you incorrectly interpret my comments as positivistic, that doesn't excuse you from addressing the arguments, ...
Phenomenology's ambit of inquiry is human experience and as such it says nothing about metaphysics, unless you mean that the metaphysical possibilitie...
I know very well what positivism is, and I don't agree with it in toto, as I've said many times, so what kind of response is that? Is it another attem...
This raises an interesting point. If Armstrong says religion is not true, which one is he referring to, or is he referring to all of them? By true do ...
Acknowledging disagreement is not the same as claiming that others who disagree must not understand. So, I said "elitist cop-out", and in the case of ...
Atheism for me is simply a lack of belief in God or gods. As far as I am aware you are not a theist yourself. In any case you didn't answer my questio...
Cheers, all that is interesting, and I haven't got to the article yet, but it still leaves me wondering whether we can coherently say something is wat...
That space and time are merely structural features of human sensibility does not follow from their being structural forms of sensibility ? it simply d...
You are making an unwarranted leap here. The fact that things always appear to us in space and time, that space and time are, in Kantian terms, "pure ...
How many times do I have to say that I am saying that thinking faith is evidence based knowledge is what is bad? That kind of thinking is what people ...
Cheers, I will take a look at the article. The question I have right now (which may be resolved after reading the article) is this: if we want to say ...
I've already made it clear that faith is not confined to religion. It is to be found in ideologues of all persuasions. Facts are supported by evidence...
Right, I wouldn't say it's always religion, but it's always ideology, which includes religion. Ideologies are like religions in that they are faith, n...
Imagining impossible worlds is an interesting idea?I have no doubt a physically impossible world could be imagined, but I wonder whether it is possibl...
I've long thought that possible world semantics is simply an exploration of what we can coherently imagine. That said, I haven't looked into it much. ...
The secularist may do the same thing with a different object of worship, though. "Hence, by proper inferences, to enlarge our notions of the grandeur,...
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