‘Rationality is useless if it is not sound. This is what Martin Luther meant when he called reason a “whore”. Pick the wrong premises, and rationality is utterly screwed. Therefore, merely that someone is “rational” means absolutely nothing about whether that person is well-connected to reality.’
Genius, as ever, though sad, enraging and just unfair.
I have talked about abstract objects many times before, such as here. It is a fundamental area to almost everything in philosophy and is not debated nearly enough. We had a Tippling Philosophers’ debate in the pub last night about the ‘I’ and personhood, which came down to whether they really existed as concepts or not. I actually deny the continuous ‘I’.
Shane Greenup has designed something which looks brilliant, and will help the internet become more intellectually robust in the future, I hope. It is a browser add-on called rbutr. Here is what he has to say about it:
Do you jump to help the less fortunate, cry during sad movie scenes, or tweet and post the latest topics and photos that excite or move you? If yes, you may be among the 20 percent of our population that is genetically pre-disposed to empathy, according to Stony Brook University psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron.
There have been some reports of the RSS feed for this blog being dodgy at the moment. There have been…
I came across a Catholic poster on facebook recently who posted an article celebrating the present Pope in combatting the Mafia. The Pope was brave in doing so, so it was claimed on this thread.
I have elsewhere talked about how the Doctrine of the Atonement is simply nonsensical. Well, here is the eminent thinker Robert Ingersoll on the subject.
According to one of these gospels, and according to the prevalent Christian belief, the Christian religion rests upon the doctrine of the atonement
Here is the press release for Caleb Lack’s new book. Caleb blogs here at SIN at Great Plains Skeptic and his book is released on my own Onus Books imprint. It is an academic book, but the ebook is very reasonably priced. Check it out!
A new light has been cast on one of philosophy’s most profound debates: Do we have free will, and if so where does it come from?
Free will seems pretty obvious. When we make a decision we feel like we’re actually making a choice, not as though a confluence of our genetic inheritance and environmental factors have made it inevitable that we will take the path we do. However, whether this is really the case is much less clear. The more we learn about the factors that cause people to act in certain ways the easier it is to question if there is any choice involved.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science has reviewed my latest book, an anthology of deconversion accounts called Beyond an…
The Information Philosopher, Bob Doyle, who has also written a book called The Scandal of Free Will has proposed a two-stage model of free will based on the thinking of William James. I bring this up because previous and infamous ATP commenter, JohnM (John Muze) has been commenting on the Unbelievable forum on facebook about it. It is his knight in shining armour which supposedly gives him the free will for which he argued so vociferously and badly when he commented here.
I have often argued about (state-funded) faith schools in the UK, and whether their above-average exam results are used in repeated examples of the correlation fallacy.
Well, it seems they are.
The reality (and having worked in some, I should know) is that the sorts of parents who want their children to do well have high aspirations. Let’s call them HAPs (High Aspiration Parents). HAPs will do things for their children to further their education, both in and pout of school. HAPs will support their children by teaching them to read early, by setting high standards and expectations for their children and so on.
This excerpt is taken from my book, The Nativity: A Critical Examination, and details why Joseph returning to his ancestral town for a census, as according to Luke is a ridiculous idea.
I recently wrote a piece, “I am Rationally Islamaphobic”, which set out why I think Islam is a problem, and is a worldview to worry about. Well, it seems like areas of the world are self destructing under its dogmatic extremes. We could argue about defining Islamic extremism, but there is something going wrong. Well, let’s look at what has happened over the last week
OK so my twins are almost 4, but that doesn’t stop me being proud when they make what appears to be good causal connections about the world around them. In this case, looking closely at a dinosaur boo, this is what happened. I was busy getting dressed and ready for work; I was impatiently in a hurry.
OK, so if you have been following the debacle of the schools in Birmingham, UK, which have involved the schools…
I am more than a little skeptical about the World Cup in Brazil.
This video is cracking (John Oliver is doing such a good job in that slot):
I have spoken about Joseph of Arimathea before, in the videos linked below. Just reading a chapter by Robert M. Price in The End of Christianity, I came across this very simple aspect which shows, to me at any rate, that Matthew’s sole job seemed to be to contrive as many random prophecy fulfilments from the Old Testament as humanly possible.
Good news, everyone! My talk for the Illini Secular Student Alliance at UIUC back in April is now up for everyone to see. In my presentation, I talk about the 20th century origins of the ancient astronaut hypothesis (now in its modern TV form, Ancient Aliens), the sorts of claims about the past and why they don’t hold up, and into the sorts of claims related to modern UFOs and alien visitations–that is, close encounters. I also get to bring up my research and book on the Star of Bethlehem.