Christian Wiman, from his book My Bright Abyss: “On the radio I hear a famous novelist praising his father for enduring a long, difficult dying without ever ‘seeking relief in religion.’ It is clear from the son’s description that the father was in absolute despair, and that as those cold waters closed over him he […]
Read more...Category: Nothing-ness
Blinkered Reality
Sean Carroll is a physicist who sometimes dabbles uncomprehendingly in philosophy, as in his entrée into the New Atheist genre, The Big Picture. In it, Carroll repeatedly and exasperatingly assumes his conclusion (there is no supernatural reality, therefore there is no supernatural reality), adopts a materialism-of-the-gaps outlook (any gap in our understanding of physical things […]
Read more...Multiverse
We took up the appearance of fine-tuning of the universe, in Gravity. Now we proceed to the multiverse, and, if it exists, how it affects the apparent fine-tuning. What if there are multiple universes? Why couldn’t there be other universes that not only might have existed under different conditions, but actually do, presently, co-exist? In […]
Read more...Atheism, Something, and Nothing
A common theme here has been that atheism is not merely the absence of belief in something, but an affirmative belief system unto itself. We propose to systematically uncover what that belief system is, beginning with the beginning. In the beginning, according to the atheist perspective, there was nothing. Not another form of prior existence, […]
Read more...Running in Place
In Agora, a post on this site about the movie by the same name, we mentioned two bits of dialogue which provide an insight into modern agnosticism. The movie is not set in modern times, of course, but it is certainly written for modern audiences. The protagonist Hypatia mouths words that have no doubt been […]
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...Philosophy Presented as Science
More Confusion about “Nothing” In the post First Cause, we mentioned a book by Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, (Free Press 2012). The basic point of the post was that Krauss seemed not to have adequately grasped what “nothing” is, when he argued that material things came from nothing. One has to read more […]
Read more...Is Materialism a Return to pre-Christian Belief?
Materialism is the belief that there is no supernatural of any kind; no God, no gods, no angels, demons, demiurges; no “fairies at the bottom of the garden,” in Richard Dawkins’ memorable phrase. Materialism Unexamined Many thinkers today write meaningfully about materialism as a set of doctrinal principles, but in the main, materialism is presented […]
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 […]
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