Wednesday, August 06, 2008

A discussion on free will on the BBC

HT: Steve Lovell

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Surprised this hasn't had any comments yet.

The discussion is between Susan Blackmore, a well published atheistic neuroscientist type and two Christians, one of whom is a Calvinist.

Susan Blackmore comes across as a half-hearted eliminativist who isn't sure whether she exists and so constantly falls into self-contradiction, saying things like "We need to be careful when we use words like 'we' as they do actually refer to anything", seeminly unaware that she just used to word "we" twice in order to make that statement.

Surprisingly none of the participant's pick her up on this. Nor does anyone pick up similar nonsense on the Calvinist side where they discuss the Islamic idea of "acquiring" responsibility for our actions.

In their discussions about moral responsibility, they turn to questions of moral truth, and it turns out that Susan thinks her own worldview has no room for objective morality. Unfortunately the discussion of that gets cut short as it's a little off topic.

The only participant who doesn't seem to fall quickly into open self -contradiction is the non-Calvinist Christian. Not that his views are unproblematic, but they do at least seem to require refutation, while the others seem to refute themselves.

Well, I don't expect the above to pass without comment. Obviously I've crazily simplified things.

This particular podcast will disappear at some point on 11th or 12th of August 2008 (to be replaced by the following week's episode) so get it while you can.

Steve

normajean said...

hahaha. I'm not trying to be funny or sarcastic, but for some muddleheaded reason I thought you (Steve Lovell) was the Calvinist in that discussion. I guess I don't properly understand V. Reppert's, "HT: Steve Lovell" indicATOR at the title on top.

Victor Reppert said...

HT means "hat tip."

normajean said...

Thanks, Vic.