This great quote came from Reddit where a commenter was reacting to my piece on the Carroll/Novella vs Alexander/Moody debate. It’s spot on:
It’s always a false dichotomy with these guys. Either the materialist explanation of consciousness has to describe absolutely everything in its entirety down to the atom, or else magic is true! “
I have been invited to come talk on the Skeptical Canary Show podcast on Wednesday evening (7pm), GMT, by Dr…
Here is an email on the back channels from fellow SINner David, who runs a great blog at SIN at…
Listening to the Reasonable Doubts criticism of the dreadful sounding film God’s Not Dead, Justin Schieber referred to a point made by Wes Morriston.
I am pretty excited that my biggest talk to date will take place later this month on Thursday 29th May…
Causality. It is a funny thing. Or not so funny.
A few years back, I took my class, as a teacher, on a class trip to the Historic Dockyard in the naval city of Portsmouth, UK. My school is some 45 minutes walk and a short ferry ride from there. With the cost of coaches, it is important to be able to walk to such places to keep the costs down for parents.
This is really interesting, and whilst it doesn’t prove anything particularly in and of itself, it does hint at a connection between more ‘out there’ irrational beliefs and free will, which, in my opinion, is equally irrational.
Some fellow tippling philosophers and myself are having an email exchange about psychology. It started with one of us writing an email lauding Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow (the bold is where he is quoting someone else).
Tihs has come up in conversation elsewhere, so I thought I would resurrect this old post from my old, old…
The other day, the CEO for Mozilla had to step down. This was due to influence from social media – a sort of power to the people. Basically, Mr Elch has held private views on gay marriage which have subsequently become public.
William Lane Craig and his obsequious co-host recently slammed Counter-Apologist and his criticisms of Craig’s use of time and the Kalam, in his recent podcast. Craig takes chap potshots at CA and is pretty disingenuous. I have red a transcript of CA’s upcoming reply, and he is spot on.
Check this video out as it will give you some background.
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off. My segment is always followed by an interesting discussion of ideas brought up by the ‘panel’ of Pauls.
This article in Mother Jones builds on work which I, myself, talked about in my book Free Will? It is certainly the case that we can predict political leanings using disgust sensitivity. As I state in my book (p. 153-4):
One of my arguments in my God on Trial talk is the argument concerning photosynthesis which I think is a powerful Problem of Evil argument. Basically, when we look at all the suffering in the world, we often forget about the millions and millions of years’ worth of suffering which has taken place on account of carnivorousness.
A few weeks back, theologian, author and blogger Randal Rauser had a pop at me. We have previously had a few cross-posts and whatnot, and even debated on US radio/Reasonable Doubts podcast on the subject of the Nativity, which can be found here. Luke, a theist who regularly comments here,, also comments at Rauser’s blog, and I got into a revived debate about libertarian free will and the Kalam.
Paper.li is a cool way of disseminating information, blogs, articles and what have you. I have signed the Skeptic Ink…
Daniel Dennett has finally responded (it has been long-awaited) to Sam Harris’s short treatise Free Will. The review can be found at the Center for Naturalism, here. I am going to look at what Dennett says, and what Harris’s idea of free will is compared to Dennett. Essentially, whilst there is lots to like about what Dennett says, there is also much I disagree with.
We had a Tippling Philosophers night the other night on beauty, and these are the quick notes I sent to someone who was unable to be there. Let me know what you think:
My belief is that:
Beauty is a word which all too often means “I like that”.
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions were. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
Some time back I posted an argument on mentalizing deficits with regard to God being unfair. This broadly stated that certain autistic type people who have an inability to empathise are less likely to believe in God, presumably because the intersubjectivity of empathy allows an agent to see the,selves from somebody else’s point of view. This means that they are less able to suppose what God would think about them whilst doing any given moral action, and such like. The abstract, to the paper looked at in the post, reads: