Perhaps you’ve seen this movie. It’s intended as a historical dramatization, for events in Alexandria, Egypt in the late 4th and early 5th century. We’ll look at the real history and then at the very different plot of the movie. Then, in another post, the attitudes and dialogue in the movie that unfold for us an […]
Read more...Category: Agnosticism
Unraveling Agnosticism
It matters what we believe. A Condemning God? Maybe you’ve heard this criticism of Christianity before: that God is unfair because He gives people the death penalty for not choosing Him. That doesn’t reflect the goodness they associate with their conception of God, so they feel there must be no God. One flaw in this thinking is that […]
Read more...Belief in Unbelief
The Privative Thesis Christopher Hitchens wrote of atheism that “our belief is unbelief.” A.C. Grayling wrote that atheism was merely a “privative thesis,” by which he meant that it is nothing more than the subtraction of supernatural reality from one’s conception of all of reality. This is a common point of view: belief in “nothing.” But […]
Read more...The Stream Without the Spring
We’re all on a spiritual journey. For some it is, alas, away from belief in any sort of great Beyond, and toward a gray, unforgiving materialism. For others, however, it’s away from embracing the brute facts of matter and time as the sum of all reality. Receptivity to Truth It’s hard to understand how one […]
Read more...Agnosticism Is Not Religious Neutrality
In “Nothing” is Not Religious Neutrality, we suggested two competing ideas, A and Z. A and Z are mutually exclusive, and together they comprise the only two possibilities concerning the subject matter. If we disbelieve A, we should believe Z, and vice versa. After following the logic of the thought experiment involving generic ideas A […]
Read more...Materialism Is Not Religious Neutrality
In “Nothing” is Not Religious Neutrality, we suggested two competing ideas, A and Z. A and Z are mutually exclusive, and together they comprise the only two possibilities concerning the subject matter. If we disbelieve A, we should believe Z, and vice versa. Non-belief Does Not Create Neutrality We discussed how muddled thinking might cause […]
Read more...“Nothing” Is Not Religious Neutrality
We considered the concept of “nothing,” for example in Is Nothing Something, and in It’s Not Nothing. Instead of conceiving of truly nothing, we tend to think instead of a something. That something may be simple or minimal or invisible or insubstantial, but it is not nothing. Something from Nothing The tendency to mis-conceive nothing […]
Read more...Gnosis and Knowing
In Agnosticism, and Not Knowing, we delved into a peculiarity of thinking among many who profess to be neutral on the God question. The very word “agnostic” implies the absence of a special knowing—a “gnosis.” That special knowing is something different than merely being persuaded by evidence. It means subjective, intuitive, experience of truth. A […]
Read more...Agnosticism, and Not Knowing
Why exactly do we say that we’re “agnostic,” when we could instead say “I don’t know,” or “I don’t care,” or “I am undecided?” Surely those are fitting, sometimes? Gnosis It could be that there is an element retained from the idea of a “gnostic,” that a self-described agnostic doesn’t want to be entirely rid […]
Read more...Agnosticism and Belief in Nothing
Physics If we begin to think of “nothing” as being, really, some sort of something, then we can convince ourselves that all of material reality came into being spontaneously. How? If the nothingness before material reality was really a kind-of-sort-of something, then the present universe could be only the result of a physical phase transition. […]
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