Marginal utility

 

In order for our money to do the most good, should it go to those who have the least? 

Socialist idea? 

Does culture determine ethics?

 Does culture determine ethics? Are there human rights that exist regardless of what the culture says? The culture of the antebellum South approved of slavery. Does that mean that slavery was OK for Southerners and those who sought to abolilsh it were wrong to do so?

The consequences of determinsm

 Determinism is the view that given what happened in the distant past (which you and I had nothing to do with) the future is inevitable. Such past events can simply be the positions of the material particles in the universe as of, say, July 13, 1950 at 12:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time. Or the set of past event could include choices God might have made to predetermine that such and such will happen. Whether it's physical or divine, given that past state, the future is inevitable. If you play a CD with Ariana Grande's music, you will hear her songs the same way every time you play it, and you won't hear Demi Lovato instead. It's predetermined.

Let's call the set of events over which you had not control X.

The argument against moral responsibility might be stated this way.

1) You are not responsible for X. (It happened before you were born).

2) Necessarily, if X occurs, Y occurs (Y is some action you performed. Think of the worst thing you ever did. Make that Y).

3) Therefore, you are not responsible for Y.

See. you're off the hook.

How did the argument from evil get to be strong?

 From C. S Lewis; 

It would be an error to reply that our ancestors were ignorant and therefore entertained pleasing illusions about nature which the progress of science has since dispelled. For centuries, during which all men believed, the nightmare size and emptiness of the universe was already known. You will read in some books that the men of the Middle Ages thought the Earth flat and the stars near, but that is a lie. Ptolemy had told them that the Earth was a mathematical point without size in relation to the distance of the fixed stars—a distance which one mediæval popular text estimates as a  hundred and seventeen million miles. And in times yet earlier, even from the beginnings, men must have got the same sense of hostile immensity from a more obvious source. To prehistoric man the neighbouring forest must have been infinite enough, and the utterly alien and infest which we have to fetch from the thought of cosmic rays and cooling suns, came snuffing and howling nightly to his very doors. Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.

stable laws

 If God did not exist, would the universe have stable laws. Minds prefer order, so we should expect stsble lsws if theism is true. But why doesn't the law of gravity quit on us ast some point? Since the laws are stable, doesn't that suggest a Bayesian argument for theism? 

From Facebbok

Yesterday my kids asked what the world would look like if God did not exist.

What would you say?

Lewis and Nagel

 

In Lewis’s essay “Meditation in a  Toolshed Lewis distinguishes between looking ay and looking along.  Looking at is the third person scientific perspective, looking along is looking from the first person perspective. This is the issue that is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s famous “What it is Like to Be a Bat.” Many, from J. B. Watson to Patricia Churchland, have argued the uselessness of introspection as sub-scientific. Lewis, like Nagel, argues that this kind of dismissiveness cannot be sustained, and he does sao on the grounds that to do so would undermine the very reasoning process that grounds the scientific argument on which the dismissal is based.  He writes:

Having been so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to looking at? in fact to discount all these inside experiences? Well, no. There are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You discount them in order to think more accurately. But you can't think at all - and therefore, of course, can't think accurately - if you have nothing to think about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is” (whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had never looked along pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking at. The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside. This case is not likely to occur, because every man has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing - all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum. The other objection is this: let us go back to the toolshed. I might have discounted what I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing. And this new instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an agitation of my own optic nerves”. And that would be just as good (or as bad) a bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you? In other words, you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is “only” tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral physiologist's own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first physiologist's skull. Where is the rot to end? The answer is that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. In particular cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside vision of the savage's dance to Nyonga may be found deceptive because we find reason to believe that crops and babies are not really affected by it. In fact, we must take each case on its merits. But we must start with no prejudice for or against either kind of looking. We do not know in advance 3 whether the lover or the psychologist is giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.t

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cause and effect

If determinism is  true, the cause has to guarantee the effect. We often use the word "cause" to refer to things that influence,

but do not guarantee the effect, If determinism is true there are causes going back before you were born

that guarantee what you do now.

Anscombe Essay on causality and determination.

No Free Will?

 Here. 

Child labor

 Here. 

Can an evolutionary biologist believe in purpose?

 By Zachary Ardern.. 

Fallacy of composition?

 1. Every molecule of the planet Saturn occupies space.

2. Therefore , Saturn occupies space.

Fallacy of composition?

The rise of anti-semitism

 Antisemitism on the rise

A disturbing trend 

Burdens of proof

 Is there a burden of proof concerning the existence of burdens of proof?

Melnyk on naturalism

 Here's a quote by materialist Andrew Melnyk. 

“Naturalism claims that nothing has a fundamentally purposeful explanation…Naturalism says that whenever an occurrence has a purposeful explanation, it has that explanation in virtue of certain nonpurposeful (e.g. merely causal) facts.”

Do you concur with this statement, or not? Do you think a materialist can, or should, reject this?

God and modern miracles

 An interview with Craig Keener. 

Too smart to believe in God?

 

Miraculous Healing: The case of Henrique Mecking

 The great chess grandmaster from Brazil, Henrique Meckiing, was at death's door from a rare disease. He is alive and well at 71 todya, and attributes this to a divine healing when his disease was at its worst. A devout Roman Catholic in the charismatic movement, he had a rating of 2606 at the age of 60. 

Does Jesus still heal? Here. 

Virtue theory and humility

 Aristotle thought that it was good to think highly of yourself, so long as you don't take it too far. The Christian traditiion says that humility is a virtue and that pride is a sin. How does virtue theory deal with an issue like this? 

From Lewis's the Poison ol Subjectivism

 After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object: it is as if we took out our eyes to look at them. Thus studied, his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenona which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth. As long as this dethronement refers only to the theoretical reason, it cannot be wholehearted. The scientist has to assume the validity of his own logic (in the stout old fashion of Plato or Spinoza) even in order to prove that it is merely subjective, and therefore he can only flirt with subjectivism. It is true that this flirtation sometimes goes pretty far. There are modern scientists, I am told, who have dropped the words truth and reality out of their vocabulary and who hold that the end of their work is not to know what is there but simply to get practical results. This is, no doubt, a bad symptom. But, in the main, subjectivism is such an uncomfortable yokefellow for research that the danger, in this quarter, is continually counteracted.