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With any discipline or line of enquiry, patience is a virtue. We must have patience regarding the amount we will ever be able to know about a given topic. Whether your ‘-ology’ is of ‘bios’, ‘theos’, or ‘cosmos’, it’s essential to remember that there will always be more questions. For some, this is an enquiry-stopper. ”Heck, if we can’t know . . . → Read More: patience… Epistemology is the most foundational of topics in philosophy. How trustworthy is human knowledge? Or worded another way: How much ‘faith’ (Greek ‘pistis’ for ‘trust’) can we put in what we think we know? At one end of the spectrum, you have narrow, ‘verificationist’ epistemologies (such as: logical positivism & naive realism) that only trust knowledge that can be ‘verified’ by . . . → Read More: a trinity of ‘knowledge-lights’… Just making preparations for song-leading at Carey graduation, and spotted this gem of a line, which opens the fourth verse of Henry van Dyke’s hymn (to the tune of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy), Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee: Mortals join the mighty chorus, which the morning stars began… I love the thought of all of the vast ages . . . → Read More: the mighty chorus My ‘techno-skepto’ mate, Damian, has posted an updated version of his funky cool little evolving tool. Head over and have a play with the numbers (offspring & mutation rate) and the target phrase. James Chastek points out that the authors of Scripture were not constructing a body of ‘evidence’ for God, but rather relating their testimony of things they were witnesses to. He remarks, “Christ, for one, was chiefly interested in making sure that he would have continual witnesses on earth, not that there would be any careful documentation of what he did . . . → Read More: for all Most popular level ‘arguments for God’ are based on the ‘art/artisan’ analogy, which is probably dismissed a little to easily at times. But nature can still quite rightly and easily seen to be God’s creation even if it was not ‘artificially‘ designed. Artifacts are designed by an artisan, and ‘natural’ things have a mystifying yet lawful and consistent character of . . . → Read More: the nature of nature It’s not every day you see an article in a theological journal by an atheist. But lo and behold, the latest issue (downloadable here freely) of American Theological Inquiry includes a ‘guest’ article by Erik J. Wielenberg called “Objective Morality and the Nature of Reality”, which is a rejoinder to a theistic critique in a former issue. He calls his . . . → Read More: brute moral facts? Interesting article (with video) here. Not only are Sam Harris’ recent thoughts about morality in tension with basic philosophical distinctions such as is/ought and fact/value, it also re-raises basic questions raised by utilitarian ethics – namely which version of ‘happiness’ is right? I listened to an interesting discussion of Sam’s ideas today (thanks to Damian for highlighting it), and at one point they were talking . . . → Read More: good maximal happiness? Another culturally embedded phrase in addition to “just as nature intended” refers to “letting nature take its course.” Excuse me? …its course?? Again, nature has no intentions… as if it had some magical ability to transcend itself and perceive the course of its own history… in other words, as if nature were supernatural. |
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