Tabula Rosa A popular Enlightenment-era conception of the human mind was that it was a tabula rosa, a blank slate devoid of content until an idea is impressed upon it by the child’s environment. It is often linked to the philosopher John Locke. It is not universally accepted, however, and many philosophers believe there is […]
Read more...Category: False Neutrality
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...Tunnel Vision
There is a disturbing trend afoot, and we should be aware of it. It is a trend which seems to be gaining momentum. It can be described as a collective tunneling of our vision, and not in the sense of healthy focus, but in the sense of disease-induced progressive exclusion of peripheral vision. Benjamin Jowett […]
Read more...Evasion
Albert Camus famously suggested that suicide is the central question of philosophy. We discussed this in the post Is Life Worth Living? There is no God, Camus believed, so there is no meaning to life. We are to live, according to Camus, acknowledging this fact, but finding a reason to live nonetheless. Is life worth living? Atheists […]
Read more...Is Life Worth Living?
The Mood of the Age Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote that suicide is the only serious philosophical problem. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus. Camus held that it was absurd to seek meaning in life when […]
Read more...Moralizing Gods
Probably no one who observes long-term trends with any reasonable historical sense would dispute that religion holds less sway in this country than in previous times. It would seem to be hard to dispute that in the law and the culture, there is a default way of thinking that avoids any mention or consideration of God. Despite that fact, […]
Read more...Zoom Out
In Inside Baseball we looked at the position of agnostics, and the point was made that agnostics are agnostic because they approach the God question from a position they suppose to be neutral, but which isn’t; and further, the degree of certainty they require for the evidence of God (this one question only) is an […]
Read more...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...Question Everything
In a previous post, Where Is God, we commented on an odd tendency we have, to ask “why doesn’t God [blank],” and then fill in the blank with something that shows why it seems justified not to believe He even exists. Perhaps what we put in the blank is that He should make Himself more […]
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