Schopenhauer Gets a Glimpse

The more clearly you become conscious of the frailty, vanity, and dream-like quality of all things, the more clearly you will also become conscious of the eternity of your own inner being; because it is only in contrast to this eternity that the these qualities of things become evident, just as you perceive the speed at which a ship is going only when looking at the motionless shore, not when looking into the ship itself.

--Slightly redacted from Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena, 1851.

How to Be an Cognitive Juvenile

"Without a trace of irony, Krauss approvingly cites physicist Frank Wilczek’s unflattering comparison of string theory to a rigged game of darts: “First, one throws the dart against a blank wall, and then one goes to the wall and draws a bull’s-eye around where the dart landed.” Yet that is exactly Krauss’ procedure. He defines “nothing” and other key concepts precisely so as to guarantee that only the physicist’s methods he is comfortable with can be applied to the question of the universe’s origin—and that only a nontheological answer will be forthcoming."

--Edward Feser, "Not Understanding Nothing", from a review of A Universe from Nothing, by the philosophically adolescent Lawrence Krauss.

The atheists themselves don't seem to see the need to be precise, exact, and consistent in their definitions or reasoning, yet chide believers in God for allegedly not doing so.

Meanwhile, the atheist crawlers, cheerleaders, and other histrionic underlings come along and---also without any reasoning---dismiss the obvious fallacies pointed out by theists.

Where's the scientific reasoning? Where's the strict rigorous numbering and inference-derivation documentation and proofs of the atheists' claims, like any logic, sets, and functions course exercises? I don't see a single atheist scholar that is even attempting such a thing. It's the theists who are taking the analysis of issues to greater degrees of argumentative meticulousness, facing the self-referential issues, asking the meta-theoretic questions, and so on---not the atheists.

I smell blood in the water.

The Sheltered Frauds of Academic Philosophy

In general, philosophers who tend to shoot off their mouths about how breathtakingly bad the traditional arguments for God’s existence are demonstrably do not know what they are talking about, as we have seen here, here, and here. And they are the sorts of people who rarely want to engage the actual arguments themselves in any depth anyway. They prefer to offer elaborate rationalizations for refusing to do so. “Come on, theistic arguments are really all about rationalizing preconceived opinions!” – said without a trace of irony – “Besides, did this Thomist whose work you recommend ever publish an article in The Philosophical Review? Did he teach in a PGR-ranked department?” That kind of thing. Shameless ad hominems and straw men coupled with a snarky, careerist conformism, all served up as a kind of higher philosophical method.

--Edward Feser's "The Non-Story of the Year"

The Self-Exempting Fun of Psychological Reductionism

We must never be misled into confounding psychological questions about the origin and appeal of beliefs with logical questions about their truth and grounds.

--Slightly redacted from Flew, A. G. N. God: A Critical Inquiry (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1984) page 72.

And of course---predictably---such reductionist claims are never made about those claims themselves.

Those Haunting Goths

Behind every great atheistic doctrine is an even greater self-referential inconsistency.

Nielsen on Scientism

Where I conflict with Quine is over his scientism. I do not think that he or Russell are right in believing that what science (natural science?) cannot tell us, we cannot know. There are all sorts of common-sense knowledge and social, political, and moral knowledge that science can tell us little (if anything) about:

that human beings stand in need of love,

that promises are generally to be kept,

that justice involves reciprocity,

that respect for others is, or at least should be, a central feature in our lives, and

that indifference to one's fellow humans is evil

are good examples. People who have no understanding of science---who even lived before the rise of science---can understand them and know them to be justified. And things are no different for us moderns. We need not wait on science to confirm or disconfirm them and for most of them at least we have no understanding of how science could confirm or disconfirm (infirm) them.

--Very slightly redacted from Kai Nielsen, Atheism and Philosophy, New York: Prometheus, 2005, page 11, "Preface to the Paperback Edition". This book (ISBN: 1591022983) was originally published in 1985 as Philosophy and Atheism (ISBN: 0879752890). Get this one, the paperback, since it's much cheaper and has the new (and very long) preface from which I have redacted the quote.

To Russia With Love

Поздравления и спасибо моим друзьям в России. Вы - мои наибольшие читатели вне Соединенных Штатов, и я оцениваю Вас читающий мой blog. Я уверен, что Вы можете выяснить мой адрес электронной почты на "g", так свяжитесь со мной, если Вы имеете какие-нибудь вопросы.