Imagine a boy, 12, on a scout camping trip. He has a tendency to impatience and impetuousness, certainly not uncommon for a boy that age. As a result, he did a poor job setting up his tent, and now he’s cold, and wet. The conditions are miserable, but they’re nothing alongside the overwhelming pathos obsessively […]
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Transcendence and Emergence
We’ve talked about transcendence a lot, including especially here and here. It is a top-down understanding of phenomena we observe, or consider through rational thought, that can’t be explained purely as matter in motion. The utility of a chair; the beauty of a painting; the harmony of music, are all emergent properties of the movement of […]
Read more...Youth Group Cringe
The Wise Kids is a 2011 film that for some reason is just now starting to gain traction. It’s probably a sleeper because it’s artsy and think-y. Probably also because the two-line blurb for the movie is, as usual with Netflix, remarkably inept. First Things contributor Eve Tushnet did a good write-up on the movie […]
Read more...Coherentism
How do we know anything? On what basis do we form our beliefs? What makes one belief justified, and another not? Welcome to the wacky world of epistemology, the study of knowledge. Not the content of knowledge, but rather the process by which we acquire it. What is Truth Going back to the Greek philosophers, […]
Read more...Advantageous
This 2015 movie is on Netflix. Watch it. Don’t be put off by the rating. Some of the people who rate evidently count the number of car crashes or sex scenes, instead of the number of brain cells engaged. This movie is artistic and has depth. At its heart, it is a philosophical inquiry into […]
Read more...What is Faith?
Here are two diverging ideas of what faith is. No Evidence One is the notion that faith is belief in something without any evidence to support it. This is the stance taken by most atheist materialists: that faith is merely childish acceptance of something as being true without demanding that it actually be true, or that […]
Read more...Certitude
Is it possible that the more certain you are about a proposition, the less likely it is to be true? The idea is not merely counterintuitive. It’s silly. And yet, atheist evangelists sometimes make this argument, citing strength of faith as evidence that Christianity must be false. Religion and Certainty Though doubts may sometimes be inevitable, […]
Read more...Emergent Properties
Here’s how not to be misled by the magical phrase “emergent properties,” in discussion of what constitutes all of reality. The Question First, remember the question at hand, when discussion of emergent properties comes up. The question is: what constitutes all of reality? Does it include only what we describe as “nature?” Or does it […]
Read more...Inconsistent Religious Beliefs
Here’s how to completely misunderstand the significance of there being a multiplicity of religious beliefs, and how to avoid that misunderstanding. Inference from Inconsistencies in Belief Atheists often argue that there can be no God because there are so many different religious traditions saying inconsistent things about the nature of God. One could argue the […]
Read more...Matter as God
You probably know the phrase “mind over matter.” It’s used in kind of a comic-book sense, oftentimes, but there’s a serious sense, too. It is the idea that Mind precedes matter. That a consciousness (the mind of God) preceded and created matter, and so all of matter is subject to its Maker, the immaterial God who […]
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