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 […]
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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 […]
Read more...Mere Machines
New Atheists In the days of the frothing-at-the-mouth “new atheists” starting in around 2008, many of the more vulnerable fence-sitters on the God question were swallowed up and inoculated against rational thought on the subject. “Nones” What followed was an even larger rise in the number of people who apparently think one can remain neutral […]
Read more...Why Am I Here?
Is there any more fundamental question? It is so fundamental to human experience that it must be hard-wired into us that we find a purpose for ourselves; and if we don’t, that we invent it. Religion and Longing One might suppose that religion is just such an invention. But if religion is an invention of man, we’re still […]
Read more...It’s the Moon, Stupid
The natural world has a goal-directedness to it. There is an element of purpose. This is what is meant by the word “teleological,” a word used by philosophers for centuries to describe the apparent purposefulness of material things. Getting to a full understanding of teleology takes some ramping up in the form of understanding Aristotle’s final causes, […]
Read more...The Form of the Forms
For many Christians, the existence of God is self-evident, reconfirmed in a thousand ways, and so there’s a tendency not to spend too much time on the introductory course, the “why I know there’s a God 101” course. It’s good to do so, however. Let’s consider now the purpose and design we instinctively impute to […]
Read more...Simple Determinism
A central tenet of theist and especially Christian beliefs is that people have agency; that is, moral choice and therefore moral responsibility, based on a moral Authority outside themselves. The modern view of reality, however, is that there is nothing beyond matter in motion governed by laws of physics, and therefore no God, and therefore no […]
Read more...Will to Believe
Let’s look at the objection many agnostics make to belief in God: “If I don’t know, I don’t know. Nor do you. One believes because he wants to believe, that’s all.” Even if this were a completely viable position to take, it wouldn’t support a stance of perpetual agnosticism, as we shall see. Williams James was an […]
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We’ve talked a lot about “transcendence” on this site. “Transcendent” is from the Latin transcendere, “climb over, surpass.” We’ve used it often here in its usual sense of the supernatural “transcending” the natural, such as by experience of an interior contact with a numinous realm: the felt experience of God. This is being written in […]
Read more...Modern Oregon Trail
Micro-review: The Oregon Trail/A New American Journey, by Rinker Buck. This book came out to a lot of advance publicity in 2015. It’s the story of the author’s and his brother’s covered wagon trip from Independence, Missouri to eastern Oregon, following the old Oregon Trail as closely as possible. I picked up the book because […]
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