The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Foundationalism

When I was in grad school, there was a general consensus amongst epistemologists that classical foundationalism was on its last legs. This included Christian, but also secular philosophers. Here is an analysis of foundationalism. 

Is consciousness mysterious?

According to Galen Strawson,


This is the assumption that we have a pretty good understanding of the nature of matter—of matter and space—of the physical in general. It is only relative to this assumption that the existence of consciousness in a material world seems mystifying. For what exactly is puzzling about consciousness, once we put the assumption aside? Suppose you have and experience of redness, or pain, and consider it to be just as such. There doesn’t seem to be any room for anything that could be called failure to understand what it is.

Scientific anti-realism and science-bashing

A redated post.

According to anti-realists in the philosophy of science. 

... a theory should never be regarded as truth...Proponents believe that science is full of theories that are proved incorrect, and that the majority of theories ultimately are rejected or refined. Great theories, such as Newton’s laws, have been proved incorrect.

That sounds like science-bashing to me, doesn't it? But, do scientists take umbrage? No,

This is the attitude of most scientists; they try to ignore the debate and let the philosophers decide the fine details about the nature of reality! 

Nice of them to leave us philosophers with some work to do.

Actually, if you were a complete scientific anti-realist, the whole creation-evolution issue wouldn't even arise.

The freedom from atheism foundation

This should prompt charges of Christian paranoia. Here.

You can do science without believing the science

One remarkable and, to my mind, wonderful thing about science is that you can do very good science without even thinking that the science you are doing is literally true. Many great scientists have been scientific anti-realists. 

Reasonable Faith on Dating Advice for Hermaphrodites

Here. 

What does causation mean?

Causation can mean a couple of different things. Something can be a cause if it guarantees its effect, or if it is a necessary condition  for its effect. When we say smoking causes cancer, we don't mean to say that it is guaranteed that if you smoke you will get cancer. Some people smoke and smoke, and never get cancer.

This is Elizabeth Anscombe's famous essay on the question.

Why the Prove-It Game can't be won

It's the regress problem. Here is a discussion by Maverick Christian.

Suppose we define evidentialism as follows:

A belief B is justified just in case there is a justified proposition C, which constitutes sufficient evidence for B.

I used to call this "the prove-it game." You need proof for everything you believe, and then proof of the proof, and then proof of the proof of the proof, and then proof of the proof of the proof of the proof, and then proof of the proof of the proof of the proof of the proof, until you finally get tired and give up.

Is there such a thing as science, or are there just sciences?

Opponents of Christianity sometimes argue that there is no Christianity, only Christianities. Could we just as easily say that there is no science, only sciences?

Determinism and responsibility

If determinism is true, then given the past, you could not have done otherwise from what you did. If you committed a murder, it is because, given the actual past, you could have done nothing other than commit that murder, and the past stretches back before you were born. If you bravely save people from a burning building, then given the past, which you did not control, you could have done nothing else. Ultimately, if determinism is true, whether we are virtuous or not is a matter of happening to be on the end of a good or bad causal chain. If that's true, how can anything really be anyone's fault, or to anyone's credit, any more than winning or not winning the lottery is to anyone's credit or discredit? 

If morality is subjective, everything is permitted

If morality is subjective, then the belief that it is wrong, always and everywhere to believe anything for insufficient evidence is also subjective. That I should care about truth as opposed to comfort is also subjective. That I should treat gay people as equal to straight people and not discriminate against them is also subjective. Or that I should treat black people as equal to white people and not put up "Whites Only" signs in my restaurant is also subjective. That women should be given equal pay for equal work, and not be restricted to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen is also subjective. That I should have sex with someone only if I have their consent is also subjective. That it is wrong to inflict pain on little children for your own amusement is also subjective. That I should care about the poor and the oppressed is also subjective. That I should want slaves to be freed from bondage is also subjective. That the Holocaust was despicable is also subjective. That 9/11 was morally wrong is also subjective.

DougJC on the teaching of evolution

And I am just as concerned that teaching evolution as a recruiting tool for atheism would downplay legitimate data, downplay certain areas of uncertainty and basically present an incomplete and misleading picture. Educators (along with scientists) should be expected to be superbly trained at leaving personal philosophies at the door of the classroom.

VR: I find comments like this very heartening. I think that people trying to tear evolution apart should be perceived as doing a service to science. The harder a theory has to work to be defensible, the better the science in the long run. 

Something I don't understand about the Kitzmiller decision

As I understand it, central to the argument in Kitzmiller was the claim that Of Pandas and People started out as a straightforwardly creationist textbook, and then was altered in response to Edwards v. Aguillard. But Edwards said that even though you can't teach creationism, you do some other things.




We do not imply that a legislature could never require that scientific critiques of prevailing scientific theories be taught. . . . Teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to schoolchildren might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.



OK, so the court says "You can't teach out and out creationism, but you can do this," so someone alters a creationist text in order to do just this, and then Kitzmiller says that it's wrong to do "just this."



This I don't understand.

On the identification of ID with creationism

Here. 

Is teaching creationism to kids child abuse?

Lawrence Krauss thinks so, here.

On our fragile moral existence

This is an account of Langdon Gilkey's book Shantung Compound. One of my favorite questions is the question "Is it hard or easy to be moral." If we think it is easy, is it simply because we have lived much of our lives in relatively easy circumstances?

Five Concepts of Purpose

When we talk about the purpose for our lives, what are we thinking about? It seems to me that there are five conceptions of what the purpose is.

1) A personal goal. That is, a purpose the person selects, because it satisfies a desire of his own. I decide I want to be a fourth-grade teacher, so I start taking classes at Glendale Community College to fulfill that goal.

2) An inherent purpose. Somehow inherent in the object itself is a purpose for existence. If we say the purpose of your eye is to see, perhaps what that means it that the ability to see is part of the nature of eyeness, as it were.

3) A satisfying purpose. It wouldn't make sense to say a rock has a satisfying purpose, but a person is satisfied if it achieves this, and we can also speak of a pig satisfied as well. "You achieved your goal of becoming a millionaire, but you seem dissatisfied nonetheless."

4) A given purpose. Someone who is responsible for our existence has a goal for our existence. This however, might not at all be a purpose that we would select for ourselves. For example, the purpose for which we raise beef cows it for us to eat their meat, which requires us to kill them in order to achieve that purpose. But of course the cows don't want to be killed. On some Calvinistic theological theories, the reason that some people exist is for them to sin and for God to eternally demonstrate his wrath towards them. However, even though those damned to hell achieve the purpose God has for them, they receive no satisfaction from that. One possible thing we might mean when we say that God loves someone, is that we think that the given purpose for their existence, the one God wants for them, is also an inherent purpose and a satisfying purpose.

5) A Darwinian function. A pure Darwinist, one who excludes all intelligent design from the explanation of anything in nature, can say that the purpose of the eye is to see, but what the Darwinian means by that is that the structure of the eye was selected for by the ultimately blind process of natural selection because it made seeing possible, and seeing was helpful in enabling the creature to survive.

Three uses of ridicule

There has been a lot of discussion about the use of ridicule in debates about religious belief. It is my conviction that discussion of this tends to conflate three different ways in which ridicule is used.

The first way is simply to entertain ourselves. Think of the Dennett Lexicon, which lampoons various philosophers by giving humorous definitions to their names. Everyone is getting hit, so the Lexicon isn't really designed to change anyone's mind or get them to reject the views of any philosophers as opposed to another. Mostly, it's about having fun. I even once made up a Dennett Lexicon entry making fun of me.I find it easy to make fun even of ideas that I think are true, but has a ridiculous side to them.

Or consider Saturday Night Live spoofs of politicians. Sure Sarah Palin was lampooned by Tina Fey's impersonation, but Obama doesn't get off scot free either. Now it is quite true that the treatment of Palin in particular did play a role in many people seeing what was problematic about her place on the Republican ticket in 2008. But can you really say that Republicans are lampooned more severely there than Democrats? I understand that George H. W. Bush loved the impersonations Dana Carvey did of him.

There is also the colorful use of reductios ad absurdum. These are really designed to refute positions. But these have to be tested as to their adequacy and accuracy. In addition, what you think seems absurd might be cheerfully accepted by your opponent. I happen to think that materialistic atheism leads to absurd conclusions, namely, I think it leads to the conclusion that no one ever believes anything for a reason. However, obviously materialistic atheists themselves think that they do believe what they do for reasons. This is not ridicule in he sense that I would consider to be offensive. 

This is from RationalWiki, hardly a pro-theistic source: 

Reductio ad absurdum is only valid when it builds on assertions which are actually present in the argument it is deconstructing, and not when it misrepresents them as a straw man. For example, any creationist argument that takes the form of "if evolution were real, we'd see fish turning into monkeys and monkeys turning into people all the time" only serves to ridicule itself, since it mischaracterises the theory of evolution to an extreme degree.

Reductio ad absurdum should also not be confused with appeal to ridicule, although both see extensive use in satire. Appeal to ridicule simply dismisses a position as ridiculous, without explaining or arguing why, while reductio ad absurdum actually pursues the logical consequences of an argument.

Here is a treatment from Freethoughtpedia: 

It's no secret you can short-circuit somebody's brain with shame. How many of us were shamed into doing something stupid in high school?

But why does it work? There are these primitive, lower parts of your brain called amygdalae that controls base, emotional reactions. That's where things like contempt and shame come from, and stimulating it can completely shut down the analytical part of your brain. The gang calls you a coward and the next thing you know, you're wedging a roman candle between your buttcheeks. You'll show them!

You can thank evolution for that. Way back when humans started forming groups and tribes, social status was everything. It's what guaranteed you food, protection and ladies (that is, a chance to pass on your genes). Mockery developed as a "conformity enforcer" to keep people in line.

Making a person, idea or behavior the target of mockery gave it a lower social position, and made it clear that anybody who associated with it would share that lower position, leaving them out of the hunting/eating/fucking that made life in the tribe worthwhile. Thousands of years later, a good dose of mockery can shut down critical thinking and make us fall right in line, no questions asked.

Now let's look at the Dawkins statements I alluded to in a previous post. 

Dawkins: Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott and others are probably right that contemptuous ridicule is not an expedient way to change the minds of those who are deeply religious. But I think we should probably abandon the irremediably religious precisely because that is what they are – irremediable. I am more interested in the fence-sitters who haven’t really considered the question very long or very carefully. And I think that they are likely to be swayed by a display of naked contempt. Nobody likes to be laughed at. Nobody wants to be the butt of contempt.

I must ask, isn't he doing EXACTLY what the Freethoughtpedia says is the Appeal to Ridicule, a fallacy? Getting people to the right result is more important to him than fostering critical thinking and getting to the right result for the right reason. I do find this offensive, which is why my reactions to New Atheists are different from my reactions to atheists of another stripe. 

I was angry with God for not existing

C. S. Lewis wrote “I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.”

Some atheists have maintained that this shows that Lewis was never a real atheist. However, recent social science suggests that atheists really do get angry with God. 

Even those who didn't believe in God were sometimes angry at the deity. College students and bereaved people who were atheist or agnostic reported more anger at God than religious people in the same demographics. The findings don't contradict the participants' agnostic or atheist beliefs, either: The study asked people about past experiences, and many atheists and agnostics had stories of anger dating from their religious pasts. Many of the study questions also asked atheists and agnostics to imagine their feelings toward a hypothetical god.

Full discussion here. 

Vallicella on Homophobia and Carniphobia

Here. 

If I believe that stealing is a sin, does that make me guilty of kleptophobia?