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Jaime: Okay, so why do you believe that your god is a good explanation for the universe? Robin: Because everything that exists needs an explanation and the universe is no exception. Jaime: But then why doesn’t your god need an explanation? Aren’t we just headed for an infinite regress unless you just admit that something doesn’t need [...]
Archive for the ‘Metaphysics’ Category
Examining Some Alleged Divine Attributes
February 21st, 2012 
Daniel Fincke 
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Christianity, Christianity, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion 
Tags: Classical Theism, Divine Attributes, Divine Simplicity, Divine Timelessness, Eternal, God, God's Timelessness, Immutability, Temporality and Eternality, Theistic God, Timeless 
22 Comments »Is It Just A Mystery Whether God Exists?
February 16th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Robin: Jaime, what bothers me about your atheism is that it’s so dogmatic. You claim to know there is no God. That’s so arrogant. Jaime: Yes, I claim to know there are no gods. But I don’t claim it dogmatically or arrogantly. I claim it based upon the fact that the evidence is overwhelmingly against [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, God, God, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism Tags: Agnostic Theism, Believing by Faith, Can We Know There Is No God?, Dogmatic Atheism, Faith vs. Knowledge, Gnostic Atheism, God and the Mystery Excuse, God is a Mystery, Is God Just A Mystery?, Knowing There Is No God, Metaphysics, Mystery, Mystery vs. Pseudomystery, What is a mystery? 70 Comments »God and Goodness
January 30th, 2012 Daniel Fincke Robin: Look, I get it, Jaime. As an atheist, you think that God’s wisdom is foolishness, that God’s righteousness is wickedness, and that the bloody death of Jesus on the cross is hateful and ugly rather than the epitome of love and beauty that Christians like I think it is. The Bible makes it very [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Authority, Authority, Bible, Bible, Christianity, Christianity, Ethics, God, God, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy Of Religion, Problem of Evil, Problem of Evil, Rationalism, Religion, Religion Tags: Divine Command Theory, God and Goodness, God's goodness, Theological Voluntarism 26 Comments »My Thoughts On Eric’s Wicca and Atheism Experiment
January 6th, 2012 Daniel Fincke In early December, after juggling 9 classes and a daily blog all semester, I got sick. Eric Steinhart, a previous guest contributor on the blog, stepped in and has been the primary blogger on the site for one month now. He has discussed possible connections between atheists and Wiccans. Thursday was my first day where [...]
Posted in Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Paganism, Philosophy Of Religion, Pseudoscience, PZ Myers, PZ Myers, Rationalism, Religion, Religion, Religious Extremism, Religious Extremism, Religious Moderates, Religious Moderates, Wicca 85 Comments »Rational Rebirth
January 5th, 2012 Eric Steinhart Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) was an Austrian-American logician and mathematician. He is best known for his incompleteness theorems and his work in axiomatic set theory. However, he also produced some deeply interesting philosophical arguments. Some of these are found in his unpublished papers and letters. One of these is an argument for life after death (for [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science, Wicca 80 Comments »The Soul is the Form of the Body
January 4th, 2012 Eric Steinhart According to the Wiccan theory of reincarnation, your soul leaves your body at death and enters a new body at conception. The Wiccan theory of reincarnation thus presupposes that human beings are soul-body composites. It is a type of soul-body dualism. Cunningham writes “The soul is ageless, sexless, nonphysical, possessed of the divine spark of [...]
Posted in Atheism, Biology, Featured, Historical Philosophy, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Wicca Tags: Aristotle, Aristotle on Soul, Aristotle vs. Descartes, Atheist views of the soul, Contemporary Hylomorphism, Hylomorphism, Reincarnation, Soul as program, What is the soul?, Wicca on Soul 17 Comments »The Logic of Creation
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart At a very high level of abstraction, Sabin characterizes the god and goddess as symbols for two aspects of natural creative power (natura naturans, being-itself as the power to be). She says that “The God represents, among other things, power unmanifest; the spark of life. The Goddess gives this power form” (2011: 117). We experience [...]
Posted in Atheism, Cosmology, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion and Science, Wicca 15 Comments »Criticizing Wicca: Rationality
December 26th, 2011 Eric Steinhart According to the Farrars, “Witches [that is, Wiccans] are neither fools, escapist nor superstitious. They are living in the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages” (1981: 105). The Farrars write that “Many witches are scientists and technicians . . . If modern witchcraft did not have a coherent rationale, such people could only keep going [...]
Atheism and Wicca: The Road Ahead
December 25th, 2011 Eric Steinhart I’ve been doing a long series of posts on atheism and Wicca. I’m working out the idea that atheistic and neo-pagan communities have more in common than they might think, and that, as American religiousity continues to shift away from Christianity, those two communities will increasingly be blended into each other. This will be messy [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science, Wicca 8 Comments »Atheism and Possibility
December 20th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The concept of natural creative power (natura naturans) is found in both Wicca (where it is the ultimate deity) and in atheistic philosophers (who do not deify it). Natural creative power is the ultimate immanent power of being; it is being-itself. Unfortunately, being-itself, as the deepest and most abstract of all universals, also seems to [...]
Criticizing Wicca: Levels
December 17th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Some statements are based on evidence, while others are not. And there is evidence for the existence of some entity if and only if the existence of that entity is asserted in a statement that is based on evidence. To say that a statement is based on evidence is to say that it is empirically [...]
Some Naturalistic Ontology
December 16th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Over the next few posts, I’m going to do some heavy metaphysics. So a bit of background is necessary. An ontology is a taxonomy of categories (usually at a very high level of generality). To avoid misunderstanding, the ontology I’m working with is outlined below. This ontology is naturalistic in exactly the sense that objects [...]
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Rationalism, Science 26 Comments »Atheism and Beauty
December 14th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Some atheists seem to be inspired by a thorough-going hatred of metaphysics; perhaps even a thorough-going hatred of all abstract reasoning. They are radical positivists (or radical nominalists, but I’ll focus on positivism). Positivism is the doctrine that only that which is empirically verifiable has any truth or reality. And while radical positivism does imply [...]
On Atheistic Religion
December 10th, 2011 Eric Steinhart We’re rational animals. Which means that we’re rational. And that we’re animals. Many biological and neurological necessities are satisfied by religion. Your neocortex has to live with your limbic system. And as long as we humans have limbic systems in our brains, we’re going to be religious (more on that later). Atheists tend to downplay [...]
The Wiccan Deity: Related Concepts in Philosophy
December 9th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Eric Steinhart here. On my analysis of several key Wiccan texts, I’ve said that the Wiccan deity is the ultimate immanent creative power of being. This is a non-theistic and non-Christian concept of the divine. Please try to avoid projecting theistic or Christian concepts into Wicca. The Wiccan deity is not a thing; on the [...]
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Nietzsche, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion, Religion and Science, Wicca 41 Comments »The Wiccan Deity: An Initial Philosophical Analysis
December 8th, 2011 Eric Steinhart More from Eric Steinhart on the Wiccan ultimate deity (which I’ll just refer to as the Wiccan deity). This deity is not the Wiccan god or the goddess, but is ontologically prior to them. My purpose in this post is to talk about some of the features of this deity and its relation to some [...]
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion and Science, Wicca 17 Comments »The Wiccan Deity
December 7th, 2011 Eric Steinhart It’s Eric Steinhart here again. I’m going to begin my critical philosophical posts on Wicca by dealing with the Wiccan ultimate deity. First, I’ll present some quotes from Wiccans describing this deity. Next (in a separate post), I’ll do some analysis and compare and contrast this deity with some other deities in the Western religious [...]
Welcome Eric Steinhart Back To Camels With Hammers
December 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Eric Steinhart, has not posted yet since Camels With Hammers moved to Freethought Blogs and for a while we did not have the archives of his articles available. I am excited to announce that Eric will be coming back this week to fill for me while I am sick. And you can now read his [...]
Podcast Series Covering The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
December 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Earlier today, I posted a link to an exceptional, accessible podcast introduction to the philosophies of the ancient cynics. The whole series that that podcast comes from is a marvelous idea and the few I’ve listened to are just great. It’s called “The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps” and it’s a must listen, basically a [...]
Posted in Epistemology, Epistemology, Ethics, Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Ethics, Historical Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, Intellectual Vices, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Love, Love, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Plato, Plato, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues Tags: Anaxagoras, Anaximander, Anaximines, Ancient Atomists, Aristotle, Aristotle on Biology, Aristotle on Four Causes, Aristotle on God, Aristotle on Logic, Aristotle on Mind, Aristotle on Physics, Aristotle on Soul, Aristotle's Life and Works, Aristotle's Politics, Aristotle's Rhetoric, Atomists, Charmides, Cratylus, Cynics, Cyrenaics, Empedocles, Epicurus, Euthydemus, Gorgias, Hellenistic Philosophy, Heraclitus, Hippocrates, Melissus, Parmenides, Plato, Plato's Cratylus, Plato's Erotic Dialogues, Plato's Gorgias, Plato's Parmenides, Plato's Republic, Platonic Love, Presocratics, Pythagoras, Socrates, Sophists, Sorabji on Aristotle, Thales, The Republic, The Sophist, Zeno 8 Comments »Why Moral Nihilism Is Self-Contradictory
November 22nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke My post against moral nihilism on Friday received many stimulating replies. I hope to address those replies, or their general concerns, as there is time and occasion in future posts. In this post–and in another I have written for later today–I want to start by answering thedudediogenes. He is the most seemingly self-conscious moral nihilist [...]
Posted in Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Ethics, Ethics, Metaethics, Metaethics, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, Moral Psychology, Morality, Morality, Naturalistic Fallacy, Naturalistic Fallacy, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Teleology, Teleology 19 Comments »Defending Philosophy 1: A Reply To Dr. Coyne
October 29th, 2011 Daniel Fincke A little Nietzsche to set the tone: Of the friend Our faith in others betrays wherein we would dearly like to have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we only want to leap over envy. And often we attack and make an enemy in order [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, Historical Philosophy, Historical Philosophy, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Science, Science 94 Comments »“Not Everything In Life Is Logical”
October 24th, 2011 Daniel Fincke When we rationalists, naturalists, and other assorted atheists insist that no one should form beliefs that disregard logic and evidence, the defenders of faith often tell us that “Not everything in life is logical”, or use some variant of this phrase. What might they mean by this? Where is their confusion exactly and how best [...]
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Astronomy, Astronomy, Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Biology, Biology, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, Evolution, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy, Physics, Physics, Rationalism, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Science, Secularism, Technology, Technology Tags: "Not Everything In Life Is Logical", Logic, Naturalism 17 Comments »Documentary with Stephen Hawking about Whether God Created the Universe
October 22nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke Your Thoughts?
Posted in Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments Against The Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Arguments for the Existence of God, Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheist Videos, Atheist Videos, Metaphysics, Metaphysics, Physics, Physics, Religion, Religion and Science, Science, Science 2 Comments »Take Philosophy Seriously (Tip 7 of 10 For Reaching Out To Religious Believers)
October 8th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Top Ten Tips For Reaching Out To Religious Believers 1. Don’t Call Religious Believers Stupid. 2. Make Believers Stay on Topic During Debates. 3. Don’t Tell Religious Believers What They “Really Believe”. 4. Clarify What Kinds of Evidence Warrant What Kinds of Beliefs. 5. Help Break The Spell Of Religious Reverence. 6. Don’t Demonize Religious [...]
The Facts About Intrinsic and Instrumental Goods and The Cultural Construction of Intrinsic Goods
September 23rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke In this post I want to say something which many would find radical and would assume is impossible and clearly false: I want to say that it can be a fact whether something is intrinsically good in some particular respect, for some particular being. A major part of this requires that I distinguish another kind of [...]
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