The PreDeath of God

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How will we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? The holiest and most powerful of everything the world has owned has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off of us? What water is there for us clean ourselves with? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games will we have to invent? Isn't the greatness of this deed too great for us? Don't we ourselves have to become gods just to seem worthy of it?"

Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they too were silent and stared at him in shock. Finally, he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke and went out. "I've come too early," he said. "My time has not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering---it has not yet reached the ears of humanity. Lightning and thunder require time, the light of the stars requires time, deeds require time even after they are done, before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from these people than the most distant stars---yet they have done it themselves."

It has been related further that on that day the madman entered different churches and sang his eternal deathsong of God. Led outside and called to account for his actions, he is said to have replied each time, "What are these churches now if they're not the tombs and graves of God?"

--Redacted from Nietzsche, "The Madman", probably sometime in 1881, in The Gay Science, Section 125, from Walter Kaufmann's The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking, 1954, pages 95-96.

Korson Certification in Philosophy

The Korson Certification Exam in Philosophy will be available at testing centers worldwide beginning January 2014. It will be a three-hour 500-question exam composed at the time of the exam from a pool of over 5000 questions. By contrast, the Graduate Record Examination Advanced Philosophy Test was also a three-hour exam, with approximately 150 questions. I do not know the size of the question pool, only that the ARCO exam preparation book used four sample tests with 150 questions each, for a total of 600 questions.

Cost of the exam will be $200. Certification will be good for 2 years, and will be awarded only if the candidate achieves a perfect score. The exam will be repeatable once every 6 months.

Ignorance of the Unctious

The only reason atheists have any influence is because most theists are stalwart ignoramuses, especially about precisely the metatheoretic and other oblique fallacies that are the *core* of atheistic objections to theism. Gale is a pompous fraud who's obviously running scared and doesn't even realize he's committing one self-referential fallacy after another. Smith is a nice, serious, and I think earnest guy, but is cluelessly committing the Zeno trick fallacy I've outlined elsewhere. If this is the best they can do, then these people are pushovers, even though they are of course still kicking most dumbell theists' butts.

I want to know the specific names of the people who are funding this stupidass analytic mediocrity in educational institutions. Of course they might react by simply closing down philosophy departments, but that's a good thing that's already being done around the country. The philosophers couldn't justify themselves if their lives depended on it anyway. lol

Time to start contacting some people in the media, let'em know about a couple of big white elephants in philosophy, maybe three. They might need some fresh news in the God debate / gnu atheism area, who knows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKsdED_bV3M&feature=related

Facing It

The right course for anyone who cannot accept the mere voice of authority, but feels the imperative obligation to face the arguments and think freely, is to begin at the beginning and to see how far one can reconstruct one's case for belief in God, inference by inference on a secure foundation of irreducibly basic premises, as far as possible without any preliminary assumptions and with a resolute determination to know the worst.

--Highly redacted from Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 14.

Idol of the Circular

Christian theology without metaphysics is an illusion. However much some theologians may want to avoid the issue by talking about revelation, there comes a point when the question can no longer be evaded: Why believe in God at all? If the only grounds for belief in the Christian revelation are part of that alleged revelation, the theologians have cut themselves off from people who think about their beliefs. If there are no grounds for believing that a Christian scheme is preferable to some non-Christian one, the choice between Christianity and some other religion or none becomes arbitrary, irrational, even trivial.

--Slightly redacted from H. E. Root, "Beginning all over again" in Soundings, edited by A. R. Vidler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1962), page 13, quoted in Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 13.

Why They're Already Gone

The types of questions which public school children ask cannot be answered satisfactorily by anyone who is not capable of answering them philosophically, because they are precisely those kinds of questions which modern philosophers ask.

--Redacted from John Wilson, Language and Christian Belief (London: Macmillan, 1958) page xiv. Quoted in Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 12.

Unintended Consequences

To the extent that faith has to be thought of as going beyond all reason, in the sense that it has to involve believing what you do not, and perhaps cannot know to be true, then if faith is to be reasonable at all, there must still be reasons of some kind, first for embarking on faith at all, and then again for choosing one faith rather than any other faith.

--Slightly redacted from Antony Flew, God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 8.

The Courage to Attack One's Own Convictions

"It is, of course, a matter of integrity and sincerity of intellectual purpose to try to make out all cases as strongly as possible. For, if we truly desire to learn the truth, then we must consider opposition positions at their strongest. That is why we have in our courts of justice rival advocates each doing the best they can for, respectively, plaintiff and defendant."

--Antony Flew (40 years before his conversion to Deism), God and Philosophy, 1966, page x.

Schopenhauer's Lightning Eliminator Method

Need some philosophical rejuvenation? Do this:

1. Go to the beginning of the philosophy section of a large university library (or the largest you can get to).
2. Open the first book.
3. Read the first 2 pages of either the introduction or of the first chapter if there's no introduction.
4. Go to the next book.
5. Return to step 3.
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4 until you've worked through the entire philosophy section.

Needless to say, your mind will be blown.

And the more you do it, the smaller percentage of books you'll want to read more of, as your taste and judgment refines itself over time.

The scope of philosophy will narrow as you realize just how few heavy hitters are doing most of the philosophical work.

May take a number of sessions, depending on how much time you have and how large the library's selection is.

You can also do this online using Amazon's preview feature, but it's not available for a number of important (and usually older) philosophy books.

Anyway, you'll find this activity encouraging, since like with anything else---there's a lot of crap out there that you don't yet realize is crap. This procedure will quickly give you a real direct sampling of all those books, thereby weeding out the one's that can't compel further reading more than two pages. Make a list of the ones you want to read more of, and you're done!  Works for journals too, but only one page should do for each article. Next library!

The Black Book of Atheism

Excerpt from The Black Book of Atheism

"1 The Black Book of Atheism documents the views and arguments for and against atheism back to their epistemic termination points---their assumed premises. (ap)

2 But the book goes far beyond those basic assumptions to the deepest issues in the philosophy of logic and metatheory, where all those basic assumptions themselves are called into question. (ap)

3 It openly and specifically identifies every basic non-epistemically argued assumption in the entire debate. (ap)

4 So it's a black book alright, but a black book of assumptions, not persons. (1,2,3)

5 Each statement is numbered. (ap)

6 Each statement's epistemic status is documented at the end of each statement with an inferential derivation tag, in the form of either "ap" for assumed premise or else one or more other previous statements in the numbering that imply the statement's truth. (ap)"

[Note: It will basically be a non-grid spreadsheet in its format. I couldn't format it like it will be in the book, but it will be streamlined and easy to read. The statement numbers will be at the margins for easy flip through to find inferentially referenced statement numbers. The online version will generate the specific argument for the current statement being read, by being clicked, and you will also be able to click an object to get a list of assumed premises of a statement's argument instead of having to inferentially backtrack statement by statement manually. The book itself will be available in casebound (I hate dust jackets anyway), paperback, and coil bindings, and also include access to pdf, text, mp3, and online interactive versions.  All content will be open source. (For more on open source, see the documentary "Revolution OS". That's where I'm going with this whole online, book-publishing, interactive artificial intelligence, and philosophy certification project.]

A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization

Just ran across Overman's A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, and will probably get the hardcover. Check it out here. Added to bibliography.

Self-Referential Analyzer In Stores Now

Actually, naturalism, materialism, and mechanism are all teleological parasites (among many other parasitic behaviors shrouded in never-mentioned self-referential slights of cognitive hand). So next time you're at the pharmacy, look for the Self-Referential Analyzer, to permanently eliminate common philosophical parasites from your intellectual life, and that of your friends and family.

Self-Referential Analyzer: Get one. Be one.

Naturalism as Teleological Parasite

What modern biology reveals to us is the existence of a physical structure that points to or aims at something beyond itself and yet is entirely unconscious. Where have we heard that before? Why, in Aristotle, of course. Moreover, as a blueprint, what this structure points to or aims at specifically is the realization in an individual organism of a certain kind of structure or pattern definitive of the species---that is to say, the realization of a form or essence. "Modern" biology isn't so modern after all; the riffs are different, but underlying the jazzy hipster talk of "information and "software" is the same old squaresville melody of Aristotelian final-formal causality. Modern science, like all rebellious adolescents, has morphed into the father figure it once reviled.

--Slightly redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 255.

Another Magic Talisman

The moderns didn't reject belief in God for resting on blind faith. They falsely accused belief in God of resting on blind faith so that they could justify their rejection of God, and cooked up a new conception of what should count as rational, hoping that the accusation would stick.

--Highly redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 221

Sociopaths are Epistemologically Equal Too

It's very hard for liberals to maintain their smug pose of moral and rational superiority over traditional religious believers and other non-liberals if they admit that their own ideals are merely one more set of ungrounded prejudices among others.

--Redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 216

Prophetic Criminology

The legislative response is always---always---to crack down on the law-abiding. "

--Commenter john_ell over at the Washington Times

Feser's Ontological Parts Warehouse: You Name it, We've Got it!

The real world is as complex as the vocabulary required to describe it.

--Slightly redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 171. I deliberately don't quote his actual core arguments because I want people to read the book. These examples are either just great quotes *about* the issues, aphoristic provocations such as the above, or sheer intellectual-cultural commentary. Always keep in mind that I'm only interested in his strictly philosophical views and arguments, and may not even agree with his act-potency, causation, hylemorphism, or his argument for God. The jury's still out, although so far I suspect his metaphysics is correct.

Hitchens, Shave Thyself

Hitchens assures us that theists "have consistently failed to overcome [Ockham's] objection [to a First Cause]." In fact, as we have seen, it was overcome long before Ockham was born. What Hitchens should have written is: "I wouldn't know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., *even* *if* I were intellectually honest; but then neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares?"


--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, pages 169-170.

The Usual Self-Exempting Suspects

"Hitchens is no scientist, but he did take a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford forty years ago, where, presumably, he came upon Karl Popper's dictum that "a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one." It never occurs to him that by refusing to allow even one of the 100 million corpses produced by Communism to count as evidence against the moral claims of atheism, he makes his own position far more "unfalsifiable" than anything Paley ever said (since, after all, the latter did allow that it was at least *possible* that organisms could have arisen through impersonal process). But then, that is the Christopher Hitchens recipe for Serious Journalism: one part real knowledge, one part filibuster, one part sheer bluff."


---Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 160.

Left Out

Liberalism: The view that you're a bigot and I'm not.

Final Causal Hypocrisy

"Compared to the way in which final causality has maintained its grip on biological thinking in actual practice, the Darwinian revolution is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle. The unhealthy fixation of Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. on the relatively insignificant Paley has kept them from seeing this fatal difficulty with their position. They have been frantically shooting their flit guns at a gnat even while an elephant grinds them into paste under its feet."

--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 130.

Hidden Ghosts of Materialism 2

If thought is merely the motion of physical components in the brain (or anywhere else in the organism for that matter), how can I remember a previous experience? Once a motion becomes a past motion, it never recurs as the same motion. How could one know or even be aware of generic similarities between two motions? To classify two entities within the same genus, I must observe some similarity between them. But materialism claims that the thought "This motion and that motion are similar" would also itself be merely a motion. And before the motion of predicating that similarity occurs, the motion of the original experience and the motion of the alleged memory experience would be in the past, and no longer exist. And no motion could connect two motions that no longer exist. Consequently, for it to be even possible for me to think generically similar thoughts, which is necessary to remember anything, I must assume that materialism is false.

Hidden Ghosts in Materialism's Inferential Methodology Machine

1.  The very process of materialist theory development already involves its falsity.

To seek correlates in the brain and nerves of the organism to explain observed differences in how we perceive things such as colors---already assumes that:

(1 the conscious state is -something- distinct from the physical correlate one is seeking for it,

(2 the conscious state can pass judgment on physical reality and all distinctions and relations between objects (such as those between correlation and the objects correlated), and

(3 all physical correlates are necessarily insignificant to the most basic and transcendent universal judgments about the comparative status of conscious states, and judgments about conscious states, in relation to physical objects.
--Highly redacted from Stuart Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism, 1957, page 222.

The Real Origin of Positive Thinking

Wisdom is always a crow feeding on dead bodies.
--Nietzsche

Analysis Predicts The Empirical

Computer simulations based on just 50 or 60 atoms are able to mimic the properties of real matter. If a small group of atoms is surrounded by other identical groups, every atom behaves as if it were part of a larger material. This makes it possible, for example, to simulate the behaviour of solids and liquids at high temperatures, and to study chemical reactions at surfaces to aid in the design of better analysis.

--Slightly redacted from the QPB Science Encyclopedia, "Quantum Simulation"