Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category.
4th May 2007, 05:31 pm
Albert Einstein said this about ethics:
I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.
I believe exactly as Einstein asserted in the above quote. There are many facts which lead me to conclude, as Einstein does, that ethics is a human invention and that there is no immortality to earn (or lose) through “good” (or “bad”) behavior. Among the facts are:
Continue reading ‘Ethical Issues Are Basic Human Concerns’ »
29th April 2007, 08:59 pm
Most English translations of the Christian Bible begin with words like these:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Well, this isn’t a blog post about the word “God” in the above quote, but rather about the word “beginning.” Some prominent Christian apologists (for instance, William Lane Craig) want to take the scientific theory of the Big Bang and assert that this event in the past history of our universe is a “beginning.” Well, I suppose that the nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico was in some sense a “beginning” (it was the first manmade nuclear explosion), but it did not mark “the beginning of time” in any real sense. And frankly, I see no real reason to view the Big Bang as “the beginning of time” in any sense more than the Trinity test explosion.
Continue reading ‘The “Big Bang” Is Not A Beginning’ »
27th April 2007, 09:37 pm
Fundamentalist Christians constantly tout their interpretation of their Bible as the only conceivable foundation for moral values. They quote Dostoevsky’s words from the The Brothers Karamazov: “without God, everything is permitted.” And they plead the argument from design: a moral law implies a moral law-giver.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have postmodernists who claim that no absolutes exist at all, and thus all morality is relative. Under some circumstances or another, any act we might view as immoral would not only be permitted, but required.
Both of these views are clearly wrong. Only a fraction of God’s laws from the Christian Bible are worthy of adherence in modern times, and most of those are moral laws that have equals (or at least, echoes) in most other cultures. The so-called Golden Rule is virtually a universal moral law as some version or another of it appears in virtually every known higher civilization. And the postmodernist assertion that no absolutes exist is also clearly wrong, as I will demonstrate, below.
Continue reading ‘Survival Is Moral Bedrock’ »
27th April 2007, 06:19 pm
By now most intelligent people understand that our genes uniquely describe at some level (high or otherwise) how to make one particular human being, namely ourselves. We may have an argument over how much of some particular feature of some particular person is caused by genes (nature) or environment (nurture), but the default answer needs to be “it is probably some of both.”
We don’t pass our genes from one person to another except when we manage to have children or participate in a transplant (where different genes between the donor and recipient can cause rejection syndromes of various types). But we are constantly passing memes between ourselves as this is part of the essence of human interaction.
Continue reading ‘Transmitting the DNA of Memes’ »
24th April 2007, 07:29 pm
Epistemology is “the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.” (Websters Dictionary) That is a fancy way of saying that it is the study of how we know things are true or false, and what degree of certainty we can assign to any particular tidbit of alleged knowledge.
Continue reading ‘What Is Epistemology?’ »