Skip to main content

idea for a book

It's a book that would be written for my children as college students.

It would principally address issues that I'm good at talking about: science/God; but it would make some reference to Catholic/Evangelical differences, but not in a way that would shift focus away from my initial goal, which is to address theism/atheism controversy.

It would also address in a very general way, the principles that should guide discussions of ethics.  In fact, it would take concerns and presumptions that go into discussions about ethics as fuel for the discussion of the metaphysical themes.  That is, it would relate ethical questions to materialism/theism/dualism

It would point to liturgy as the profoundest human achievement

It would look to Sokoloski as a model of clarity; to RD as a model of exuberance, sense of beauty and humor (but w/o schoolyard bullying); to St. Terese as a model of personal testimony of confidence in God; and Giussani as a model of Christ-centered holism and faith as adventure.

Its tone would be like that of my emails: try to avoid being pompous, funny in an off-the-cuff manner, hopeful, appreciative of beauty, charitable interpretation of opponents and seek their strongest arguments and present them fairly; ready to make distinctions and to employ self-referential arguments to undermine unwitting dogmatism; avoid tribalism; and it would finish with an exhortation.

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?