— 1 — Yesterday, I wrote a post about what I do here at Unequally Yoked to minimize trolling and facilitate productive debate between believers and atheists. But, as much as I’d like to give sole credit for defusing tensions to frequent math geekery, I’m really grateful to the commenters for almost always good behavior. So the theme for this week’s Takes is just Things that are Objectively Awesome. — 2 — And I’m leading off with one of the most awesome... Read more
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. Perhaps... Read more
The response to Squelchtoad’s thought experiment has been delayed until tomorrow (I got a little snowed under by Udacity). I’ve been doing a number of replies in the comments of that post, and I’ll have something more coherent for you tomorrow. To tide you over, I’ve got a couple quick thoughts on a defense of superhero movies written by the guy playing Loki in the Avengers. Quoth he: [S]uperhero films offer a shared, faithless, modern mythology, through which these truths... Read more
My friend Squelchtoad has posed another useful thought example up at his interblag. I’m excerpting below, but you should pop over and read the whole set up. It’s targeted to people like me, who think morality exists in some objective, possibly neo-platonist way and therefore feel unsettled without a well-grounded moral philosophy. Squelchtoad writes: Suppose I could demonstrate to you beyond all possible doubt that one of the following two propositions was necessarily true: There does not exist a supreme... Read more
I received a review copy of Tripp York’s book (The Devil Wears Nada) free of charge, but I made no agreements about the substance of the review with him or anyone else. The Devil Wears Nada turned out to be a little out of my wheelhouse, since Tripp York is mainly addressing evangelical protestant conceptions of Satan, but I found it to be a mostly enjoyable read. Atheists or anyone else trying to pick fights over this aspect of theology will find... Read more
This post is part of Patheos’s book club for T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I recieved a review copy free of charge. In T.M. Luhrmann’s ethnographic study of charismatic evangelical Christians, When God Talks Back, communing with God is a strenuous practice. Cultivating a personal, two-way relationship is a choice for these Christians, and the sheer level of effort they put into changing their minds trips a lot of my epistemological red flags. The people... Read more
— 1 — The anti-gnostic cooking project continues on apace. This week I made cheddar-chive scones (the second thing I’ve ever cooked!). Some friends came over and nommed them up with me while we watched Of Gods and Men which is (a) stellar and (b) also helpfully anti-gnostic in its own way. I’d appreciate any easy recipes I could attempt in the future (but be patient, I’m travelling the next two weekends). And keep in mind that I’m picky eater... Read more
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman draws on a lot of empirical studies where subjects make clearly irrational decisions. A choice throws an exception in an otherwise functional heuristic, and the subject takes an action that doesn’t promote his or her stated goal. But one of the studies Kahneman cites doesn’t seem to fit into this model. In the experiment, subjects placed a hand into painfully cold water and had to keep it there for 60 seconds. After a... Read more
This post is part of Patheos’s book club for T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I recieved a review copy free of charge. This was a fascinating book to read right on the heels of Thinking Fast and Slow, because both books seemed to be mostly about changing our intuitions and heuristics. Luhrmann is embedded in a charismatic sect of Christianity. No snake-handling, but plenty of two-way dialogue with Jesus and what Luhrmann... Read more
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This Doesn’t Look Like a Victory to Me
Over in Patheos’s Catholic channel, Thomas McDonald of God and the Machine has run into a couple problem commenters. Specifically, the kind of atheist who think posting the following in a Christian combox is equivalent to counting coup: The creation story of your own religion involves a man created out of dust who is convinced by his rib-woman wife to eat a magical fruit because a talking snake told her that it would make them like gods. The universe as... Read more