Skip to main content

Two stories

If an atheist can use natural selection as a story that establishes the materialistic understanding of human nature; then a theist can use the big-bang as a story to establish the creation of the universe in time.

If!

There's a way for the atheist to avoid the theist's argument: posit a multiverse or some other presently unprovable entity. Or say that the universe's origin is necessarily a mystery about which we can make no warranted claim (after all, says this neophyte mystery-monger, we can make such claims only about what a scientist can measure or observe).

And there's a way out for the theist too: point out how humans beings are able use their minds. That is, we can know universal and necessary truths, such as the truths of logic, mathematics, metaphysics and of nature. These are truths encompass our universe, and some of them encompass even our multiverse (if there is one, of course). They transcend material limitations in a way that undercuts materialism.

But wait: the theist is relying on evidence that is right in front of him, while the atheist is making an act of faith.

Which of these two is being led by a dogmatic faith and wishful thinking? Which is basing his convictions on evidence?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

entropy, teleology

Perhaps the best way to understand entropy is to look at it as the tendency of things to arrive at equilibrium.  Many non-living processes head in that direction, but not all.  For an example of an exception, consider the movement of electrons around the nucleus: that movement itself doesn't seem to be heading toward any equilibrium… unless one considers the tendency of atoms to combine into molecules so as to fill the electron shells.  If reductionism is false, then isn't the fact that organisms continually create disequilibrium at one level, while seeking another equilibrium (for example a full stomach) quite relevant?   Of course, entropy as a law is about systems, not individuals…. right?