Getting random stuff organised
Some atheists do. Others—like the millions of atheists in China—have probably never heard of philosophical arguments regarding gods. But for those atheists who are aware of these alleged arguments and don’t bother to engage in them, the reasons include: The arguments don’t relate to what people actually understand ‘gods’ to mean. Often the conclusions reached …
Continue reading “Why don’t atheists like to philosophically argue the existence of the gods?”
This is a popular theist myth, and it’s not hard to see why. If theists can manage to convince themselves that people become atheists for irrational reasons, then it makes their own evidence-free beliefs look better by comparison. But it’s not true. Most people who converted to atheism from some religious belief did so just …
Nobody rejects gods as an option. It’s entirely possible that gods of some kind were involved in the creation of the universe and/or life. But there is no evidence of it. And that makes it just one of an infinite number of unevidenced possibilities, no one of which is any more likely to be true than any other. …
Almost certainly not. So many people on Quora keep asking questions of the form ‘Has this happened?’ where ‘this’ is something which would break physics. Obviously they haven’t thought things through. Stuff that breaks physics is important, and important stuff makes headlines. If ghosts, or ESP, or an afterlife are proven to exist, you won’t …
In ordinary usage we think of sentences as having meaning, but philosophers like to abstract the idea of meaning from what sentences actually say. What we would describe as the ‘meaning’ of a sentence they call a ‘proposition’. This allows them to say that: Some sentences don‘t express any propositions. ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ is …
Doing good science takes time and costs money. The people who pay for science are generally concerned with getting results that they can use. They recognise that not all research produces results, but given the choice they will fund the research that is most likely to come up with something useful and important. Most working scientists …
‘Logic’ is a purely linguistic technique for establishing the truth or falsehood of certain propositions. It depends on those propositions resembling other propositions, about which the truth is known, in certain specific ways. What you are asking about is not logic but deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning certainly ‘works’ reasonably well in most circumstances. It is …
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