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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 »The Atheism and Wicca Series So Far
January 5th, 2012 Eric Steinhart Some folks have jumped into this series just recently, and others have had some trouble following due to the server problems in the last two days. The point of this series is to critically examine Wicca (and other neo-paganisms) through the lens of atheistic analytic philosophy of religion. So here’s the list of links to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science, Wicca 2 Comments »The Eternal Return of the Same
January 4th, 2012 Eric Steinhart The classical versions of eternal recurrence say that recurrence occurs within our universe. Those classical versions say that there is a cyclical pattern of events in our space-time. Since the classical theory of eternal recurrence makes claims about our universe, it is open to scientific study. And it is almost certainly false. There is no [...]
From Aristotle through Buddhism to Nietzsche
January 4th, 2012 Eric Steinhart Among all the classical theories of life after death, the one that seems to be most consistent with naturalism is the ancient Buddhist concept of rebirth. This concept is developed in Theraveda Buddhism. Theravedic Buddhism is an atheistic (or non-theistic) religion. Rebirth is linked to the Theravedic doctrines of impermanence and no-self. These doctrines imply [...]
The Ontological Argument Against God
January 2nd, 2012 Eric Steinhart Many atheists seem to hate all metaphysics; perhaps the hatred is motivated by the notion that all metaphysics eventually leads to God. Of course, that is entirely false – there is a long tradition of purely atheistic metaphysics, which is as deep and abstract as theistic metaphysics. Any atheism that embraces rigorous metaphysical thinking is [...]
Two Arguments for Evolution by Rational Selection
January 1st, 2012 Eric Steinhart Although there is some empirical justification for the Principles of Sufficient Reason and Plenitude, much of the discussion of the logic of creation and evolution by rational selection has been highly abstract. It has been a priori; a matter of pure reason. But it is reasonable to demand empirical justification for those metaphysical theories. To [...]
On Evolution by Rational Selection
January 1st, 2012 Eric Steinhart Almost all atheists are surely aware of Darwinian evolution, which is evolution by natural selection, and which explains the history of life on earth. Universal Darwinism is the thesis that evolutionary principles operate beyond earthly biology. Of course, not all things have genes or compete for survival in ecosystems. More general evolutionary theories need not [...]
Creation Stories
December 31st, 2011 Eric Steinhart Many religions have creation stories. The Judeo-Christian creation stories are found in the first chapters of Genesis, which is the first book of the Bible. There is no need to repeat the Genesis stories here. It can be agreed that there are some metaphorical or analogical correspondences between the Genesis stories and our best science. [...]
Criticizing Wicca: God and Goddess
December 29th, 2011 Eric Steinhart According to several Wiccan texts, the Wiccan ultimate deity manifests itself in two forms, the male god and the female goddess. The first way to think about the god and goddess is realistic. This is theological realism: the god and goddess are both real things. They exist. A Wiccan who thinks like this is ontologically [...]
On Participation in Being-Itself
December 29th, 2011 Eric Steinhart On Tillich’s view, since the divine is being-itself, all humans participate in the divine simply by existing. But that participation is not experiential. Any experiential participation in the divine can only be through the distinctive ways in which humans exist. We participate in being-itself through our own being. Since you are material, you experience being-itself [...]
The Wiccan God and Goddess: Reality and Mythology
December 28th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The Farrars have an intriguing discussion of the ontological commitments of Wiccans to their god and goddess. Their discussion has three parts: (1) the realist thesis; (2) the anti-realist antithesis; and (3) the pragmatic resolution. The more detailed version of the Farrar’s discussion goes like this: (1) The realist thesis says that the god and [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Wicca 7 Comments »Wicca and the Problem of Evil
December 28th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Many Wiccan writers criticize Christians for dividing the ultimate deity into a purely good God and a purely evil Devil. They deny this division. Buckland writes: “the idea of dividing the Supreme Power into two – good and evil – is the idea of an advanced and complex civilization. The Old Gods . . . [...]
The God and the Goddess
December 27th, 2011 Eric Steinhart On the basis of their own texts, presented in an earlier post, it seems like Wicca affirms the existence of an ultimate deity. On my analysis, the Wiccan ultimate deity is the ultimate immanent creative power of being. It is an entirely natural power and it appears that the concept of the Wiccan ultimate deity [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Religion, Wicca 5 Comments »Pure Objective Reason
December 23rd, 2011 Eric Steinhart As immanent, being-itself is just the ultimate nature of every natural thing. So, how does this immanent being-itself manifest itself? It manifests itself in all the categories of nature. These are the categories of naturalistic ontology. To use some language from Nicholas of Cusa, these categories are derived from the self-unfolding of being-itself. This unfolding [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science 15 Comments »Atheism and the Sacred: Being-Itself
December 22nd, 2011 Eric Steinhart Paul Tillich defined God as being-itself. He argued that being-itself is not any being; it is not a thing, and it does not even exist. For Tillich, being-itself transcends existence. It cannot be identified with any being (neither with any particular nor with any universal). It cannot be located within the categories of any ontology [...]
The Impossible God of Paul Tillich
December 21st, 2011 Eric Steinhart Paul Tillich was a Protestant theologian writing in the middle of the Twentieth Century. His writing is highly abstract, so you’ll have to forgive me for using abstract language here. He is perhaps best known for his idea that God is the ground of being; that is, God is being-itself. For atheists, Tillich says some [...]
Atheism and the Sacred: Natural Creative Power
December 18th, 2011 Eric Steinhart The concept of natura naturans has a long history in philosophy, and especially in atheistic metaphysics. Natura naturans is natural creative power, and from now on I’ll use that phrase. Natural creative power is a universal; as such, it is an abstract object. Nominalists deny the existence of abstract objects. So, nominalists are likely to [...]
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science, Wicca 31 Comments »Criticizing Wicca: Energy
December 13th, 2011 Eric Steinhart On the basis of my reading of a few Wiccan texts, I said that Wiccans believe that their ultimate deity is the ultimate immanent creative power of being. This is an old Platonic idea. The existence of such a power of being is endorsed by a number of atheistic philosophers (like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and [...]
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 »John Shook: Proving God’s Existence Is Impossible
November 17th, 2011 Daniel Fincke This semester I have been teaching Philosophy of Religion using John Shook’s superbly thorough, systematic, incisive, and critical summation of the arguments for and against the existence of God, The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between). The book is impressive enough that I would give it the [...]
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, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Evidence, Evidence, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, New Atheism, Philosophy Of Religion 14 Comments »
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