Philosophy

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Last Thursdayism - SkepticWiki


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Last Thursdayism
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[edit] Definition
Last Thursdayism, also Last Tuesdayism and Last Wednesdayism, is the unfalsifiable belief that the whole of the universe was created Last Thursday with the apparent age of an ancient universe.
[edit] Discussion
The belief, much like the belief in the Invisible Pink Unicorn, is a parody of one of the many [...]

5Dec2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Believing in Transformation | Psychology Today


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The human mind always seeks solutions to problems and occasionally finds itself in a complete stalemate. Death is one of them, the ultimate one. Human beings can’t imagine our own absence. The concept of nonexistence for an existent being is, at best, baffling, like endless space or other universes. Such puzzlement precedes enlightenment.
When confronted with [...]

25Nov2009 | Admin | 1 comment | Continued
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God is the Creator & Sustainer of Existence


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God is the Creator & Sustainer of Existence
A very common attribute of gods in religious traditions around the world is that of creation — our universe, our world, and indeed our very selves often owe their existence to creative acts of the gods. In the Western traditions of philosophical theism, the existence of everything is [...]

26May2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Should We Respect Religion? Does Religion Deserve Respect?


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By Austin Cline, About.com
An increasing source of conflict in the world today is centered around religious believers’ demands for respect. Muslims demand “respect” that would forbid criticism, satire, or mocking of their religion. Christians demand “respect” that would amount to something very similar. Nonbelievers are caught in a bind when it’s not clear what “respect” [...]

7Apr2009 | Admin | 1 comment | Continued
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How scientists really feel about God


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WASHINGTON - Scientists hate God. Or find God very disturbing. In fact, modern science has found no evidence of God and so it’s stupid anymore to think God exists.
The above statements are often presented as conventional wisdom, but are they true?
A new collection of short essays, discussed here Thursday at an event at the American [...]

6Apr2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Science Allows us to Say God Does Not Exist


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A popular objection to atheists’ arguments and critiques of theism is to insist that one’s preferred god cannot be disproven — indeed, that science itself is unable to prove that God does not exist. This position depends upon a mistaken understanding of the nature of science and how science operates. In a very real and [...]

25Jan2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Do People of all Cultures Believe in Free Will?


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Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by whatever happened before. So the things that happened at the very beginning of the universe caused the things that happened next, which caused the things that happened after that… right up until the present day. Now imagine that human decision making [...]

25Jan2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Douglas Adams Speaks


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This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn’t think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought ‘what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say’? So I thought I would settle [...]

11Jan2009 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?


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The following material examines arguments officially and formally refuted in Richard Carrier, “The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities against a Natural Origin of Life,” Biology & Philosophy 19.5 (November, 2004), pp. 739-64. Note the clarification added to Addendum C regarding the definition of self-replication. In addition, new and important breakthroughs are continuing. For example, see: Graciela [...]

19Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First


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 Being epistemically responsible – not taking appearances at face value and seeking external confirmation for belief – inevitably pushes us toward intersubjectivity and science. This in turn increases the plausibility of the claim that there’s nothing over and above the natural world, what science shows to exist.

About the most crucial distinction we can make as [...]

18Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Jonestown and ‘confirmation bias’


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From Jonestown to tribalism to presidential politics, individuals seek the like-minded.
On this day 30 years ago in the jungles of Guyana, Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple cult, ordered the mass suicide or murder of more than 900 of his own followers by inducing them to imbibe cyanide-laced punch or by lethal injection. He [...]

8Dec2008 | Admin | 1 comment | Continued
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What is Naturalism?


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Naturalism, in essence, is simply the idea that human beings are completely included in the natural world: there’s nothing supernatural about us. Naturalism is based [...]

5Dec2008 | Admin | 1 comment | Continued
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Empircism and Naturalism


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Glen Davidson
posted 11/13/08 @ 12:17 PM CST
Ever since Kant it has been recognized that empiricism is not anything that gives us “Truth,” or at least we cannot know that it does. We know this without having to bring evolution into it. Yet we do have ways of understanding the world that are consistent and reliable, [...]

4Dec2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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A Question of Faith


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Like Wolpe’s book, Maher’s movie raises questions about faith; unlike Wolpe, Maher isn’t interested in answers. “Religulous” is a profane, condescending, and often funny rant against religion — Christianity especially, but also Judaism, Mormonism, and Islam. Maher’s mocking documentary promotes the idea that only oddballs, cranks, and nincompoops can take religion seriously. That’s a fairly [...]

24Nov2008 | Admin | 1 comment | Continued
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Atheism, a positive pillar


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Anti-atheism might have found its ugliest public expression during an episode in the Illinois Legislature this spring. As atheist activist Rob Sherman attempted to testify against a $1 million state grant to a church, Rep. Monique Davis railed, “This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their [...]

22Nov2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Morality, Religion and Atheism


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Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew. Many would go further and agree with [...]

10Nov2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Do Atheists Pose a Threat to Morality?


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Atheism is said to pose a major threat to morality. Some theists claim that disbelief leads to moral relativism and undermines a major factor motivating prosocial behavior. Recent research can help us see what is true and false about these anxieties.
These issues have special resonance in the United States. A new survey by the Pew [...]

27Oct2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Psychology of Supernaturalism; why humans are so screwed up


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Psychology of the Supernatural
Sometime during the upper Paleolithic era 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans experienced cognitive changes that created the ability to use our modern symbolic language.
These cognitive changes were only possible because a virtual space had been created in the minds of archaic humans.
The need for greater impulse control (niceness) in archaic [...]

18Sep2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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C.S. Lewis and Naturalism


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Can Naturalism Explain Reason, Nature, and Morality?:
By Austin Cline, About.com
C.S. Lewis wanted to explain nature on the basis of his supernatural god; as a consequence, naturalistic explanations for nature represented a major threat — just as it does for contemporary apologists. Lewis argued against naturalism in a variety of contexts. It plays an important role [...]

20Aug2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Theology, Apologetics, and Religious Philosophy


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Same Questions & Topics, Different Motives
By Austin Cline, About.com
Both theology and the philosophy of religion have played important roles in Western culture, but not everyone understands the important differences between them. The motives behind theology and the philosophy of religion are very different, but the questions they ask and the topics they address are often [...]

9Aug2008 | Admin | 1 comment | Continued
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Evolution of an Atheist


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I was regularly lied to from the day I was born, although it took me awhile to realize it. What was this lie? I was told there was a god who both cared about me and wanted me to fear him, or else he would strike me dead with a Lightning Bolt from the Heavens. [...]

18Jul2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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No Soul? I Can Live with That. No Free Will? AHHHHH!!!


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Imagine a world where no one believed in free will. Life would no longer have meaning, right? We’d be robots, puppets on a string, living a mockery of a real human existence. And why be moral? After all, if we do something bad, we didn’t freely choose to do it, and so we cannot be [...]

3Apr2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Naturalistic Religion?


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[snip] As I examine the nature of our environment, I discover sovereign forces able to create floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as well as roses, rainbows, pine trees, and snowflakes, and with this realization I am stirred with a sense of awe, wonder, and reverence. Humans are at the mercy of these natural forces, which [...]

26Mar2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Naturalism, Values and Community


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Many atheists have an almost phobic reaction to any discussion of morality. I sympathize with this reaction. Let’s face it, morality is a messy subject. It contains the seeds of condemnation, punishment, alienation and guilt. But we shouldn’t shy away from this discussion just because religion often uses a moral code [...]

21Mar2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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God Indicted for Crimes Against Humanity


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Introduction
Does God stand above morality, defining for us what is moral and what is immoral in accordance with His will? Or is morality a characteristic that exists independent of what God wills to be moral or immoral? For at least 25 centuries, these two related questions, or variations thereon, have troubled those of us who [...]

14Mar2008 | Admin | 0 comments | Continued
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    On March 13, 2008, the International Space Station passed across the field-of-view of Germany's remote sensing satellite, TerraSAR-X, at a distance of 195 kilometers, or 122 miles, and at a relative speed of 34,540 kilometers per hour, or more than 22,000 mph. In contrast to optical cameras, radar does not 'see' surfaces. Instead, it is much more aware of the edges and corners which bounce back the microwave signal it transmits. Smooth surfaces such as those on the station's solar generators or the radiator panels used to dissipate excess heat, unless directly facing the radar antenna, tend to deflect rather than reflect the radar beam, causing these features to appear on the radar image as dark areas. The radar image of the station therefore looks like a dense collection of bright spots from which the outlines of the space station can be clearly identified. The central element on the station, to which all the modules are docked, has a grid structure that presents a multiplicity of reflecting surfaces to the radar beam, making it readily identifiable. This image has a resolution of about one meter (about 39 inches). In other words, objects can be depicted as discrete units--that is, shown separately--provided that they are at least one meter apart. If they are closer together than that, they tend to merge into a single block on a radar image. Since this image was taken, the station has expanded and is more than 90 percent complete, including a full complement of solar arrays. Image Credit: DLR
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