The Human Question

That time is of infinite duration is a claim that is in principle never confirmed by experience, yet accepting the claim as both meaningful and true is a necessary condition for being a materialist... the sort who would subject theism to the verificationist principle for meaningfulless and/or truth.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=closing-gap-between-psychology-and-god

This based on the same wonderful conversation with my friend J___: He initially proposed that the alleged miracle at Fatima could be explained by natural laws that we don't know. My initial reply was that this is ad hoc.  Another point would be that appealing in an ad hoc manner to hidden natural laws to defeat rather compelling claims regarding miracles, can after a point, amount to belief in magic.  Or rather, one who is quite ready to postulate unknown natural powers to explain apparent miracles lacks a principled basis for rejecting magic.

This is a response to an objection posed to my use of a Platonistic intuition of number to advance some part of natural theology (I forget which part).  My buddy J_ objected by pointing out that while there have often been a good number of Platonists in mathematics, the last few decades mathematicians have seen a greater number of mathematicians who embrace a naturalistic view of math... one which maintains that the truths of math are merely reliable rather than something epistemically extraordinary. My reply is to embrace a reliabilist epistemology but point out that it is quite consistent with a Platonic ontology.  That is, my reason for positing supra-natural / meta-physical reality is not quite the fact that I know that 3 + 7 MUST equal 10 and that all other rational beings must agree that it is  true .  On the contrary, my reason is the fact that what I know when I know 3 + 7 = 10 is the same as what anyone else knows--even if neither of us is absolutely sure ...

http://mylordkatie.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/margaret-sanger-provider-of-death/

Thank you, ____________, for your cordial reply.  Even though your remarks are often over my head, I am gratified by what I do understand, and I entertain the hope that some of those things will become at least a little clearer as time goes on.  I enjoyed learning how my remarks re China resonated with you.   You said: Although it breaks my heart to do it, I'll admit that there are some voids or limitations in our experience which religion might help occupy Ah, it shouldn't break your heart: it's the guarantee that the ultimate Reality, being in some sense infinite, will never leave you bored.  What if that Reality--that Mystery--is so great that we should continue to be enraptured by it... even if we existed for eternity?  What's not to love? You continue by proposing the view of Einstein, who said: "I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind...

There's the famous thought experiment in which a scientist named Mary is said to know everything about the color blue that can be conveyed through science.... but she has never seen the color blue (either because she lives in a black and white world or because she's color-blind)... until that blessed day when she sees blue for the first time: does she know something that she didn't know before?  Why yes. That's the famous thought experiment.  Now here's my own variation on that theme. Suppose someone is able to do a complete physical analysis of Mary's brain while she is either looking at or remembering blue.  Will they find any blue in there?  Why no, unless your talking about a part that was blue already. Soooooooooooo. That thought experiment + question shows that it's just fanciful  to say that Mary has an image of blue in her brain: how can you have an image of a color that is not itself the color that it's supposed to represent? You can't...

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review/