Immoral Moral Law, Unnatural Nature

April 25, 2012 By 28 Comments
Excerpted from Dresden Codak's Dungeons and Discourse. It was the closest I could get to Squeltchtoad's hypthothetical

Squeltchtoad's Immoral Moral Law thought experiment was weird and paradoxical enough that I had a lot of trouble getting purchase on the problem.  That confusion might be actually be evidence, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't giving myself an easy out.  Since I was having trouble thinking about the problem in situ, I tried to carry it over into another discipline. For mathematicians or physicists, perhaps Squelchtoad's hypothetical would be the discovery that the universe was disordered. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy, Morality in Practice Tagged With: , , 28 Comments

Evangelicals Pitching Skepticism?

April 4, 2012 By 17 Comments

(Part one of two on the apologetics offered by missionaries outside the Reason Rally) I was about an hour late to the Reason Rally because I couldn't resist stopping to talk to the Christian evangelists who were ringing the rally. The conversations probably went on longer than was productive (I'm bad at taking my own advice about walking away from arguments), but I thought there were some interesting tactics on display. The biggest surprise? I heard more pitches for radical skepticism from … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Apologetics, Debate Tactics, Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: , , , 17 Comments

Infinite Regress is a Slippery Slope

April 3, 2012 By 35 Comments

A friend of mine, who blogs sporadically as Squelchtoad, had a great response to the NYT review of Krauss's book A Universe from Nothing that I mentioned in the recent neuroscience post.  I'm excerpting Squelchtoad's commentary, but you should hop over and read the brief piece yourself: But it occurs to me that the Albert riposte to Lawrence Krauss might also work at least for the more naïve versions of that theological argument. What does it mean for God to be a “necessary being”? Well, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: , 35 Comments