Does the theological idea of an eternal God really mean a God that exists in time but merely has infinite duration? Or does it mean a God that's outside time entirely, such that the creation of the universe involved the creation of time as well as space?

We can hypothesize the existence of an omniscient God that knows everything that happens in time and space, but that doesn't necessarily mean that he knows before (or after) it happens. So we shouldn't say that God knows what we are going to do before we do it, suggesting that we can't do anything else.

We needn't conclude that God's knowing somehow constrains what happens. The details of what happens might indeed be the result of the free choices of the ants in God's little ant-farm. God just knows (timelessly) the outcomes of those choices.

"Monozygotic twins are those that develop from the same zygote (sperm+egg) and are described as identical twins. They have identical genetic codes. In other words the physical aspects of such twins are indistinguishable i.e. insofar as the physical is concerned monozygotic twins are perfectly identical."

I'm not convinced that the third sentence follows from the first two. Even if two individuals have an identical genotype, they aren't necessarily going to have an identical phenotype. That's because there's an element of randomness to fetal development.

"Yet, even such twins are vastly different in mind."

Probably not vastly different. But I'll acknowledge your point that they develop into distinct individuals,

But think about the human brain for a moment. It's hugely complex. There are so many neurons, and so many interconnections between the neurons, that the precise details can't all be coded by the information contained in one's DNA. The DNA apparently gives more general instructions: 'grow an axon in a particular direction, attracted by a particular sort of thing'. But the precise details are going to be pretty stochastic.

I wrote: "We were in Syria to help defeat ISIS, and now that ISIS no longer holds any territory and its "caliphate" has been erased from the map, that's been successfully accomplished."

Ssu writes "How typical of the arrogant and ignorant hubris that is so usual."

You conveniently left out the next words that I wrote: "It probably remains as an Islamist insurgency, but the locals need to be the ones to tackle that. We don't need to become another participant in Syria's all-against-all civil war."

When we got involved, ISIS was a territorial state. It extended from east of Damascus to Mosul and from the Turkish to the Saudi borders. It had a government, treasury and judiciary. It occupied an area as large as most European countries ruling millions of people. It was expanding on all sides and seemed for a while there to be almost invincible, even threatening Baghdad. (Leading millions of Muslims around the world to believe that it had the favor of God and attracting thousands of foreigners who wanted to be part of the glory.)

Today that's all gone. ISIS holds no territory at all and its reputation for invincibility is finished. It's very hard for anyone to believe any longer that its fighters are God's chosen. Foreigners aren't rushing to join it, but to escape Syria and make their way back to wherever they came from (often Europe).

Certainly there are locals, in both Syria and Iraq that still support the Islamist ideology that it stood for, which isn't so different than the many other Islamist groups in Syria that pretty much comprise the "Syrian rebels". And there are inevitably going to be Syrians (and Iraqis) that support that kind of revolutionary religious fundamentalism.

But that's something for the Syrians and Iraqis to work out for themselves. The United States can't keep US military in these places until everyone changes their hearts and their minds. The US military is a fighting force, not an international social-change agency.

I think that the first rules of deploying military forces is to give them achievable objectives and an exit strategy.

If you disagree with me about that Ssu, perhaps you might want to encourage the European Union to replace the Americans. (There are only 2,000 Americans in Syria, Finland alone could easily replace them.) I'm not sure what mission those European troops would be given or what they would be expected to accomplish, but that would be Europe's decision to make.

"What crime is he committing?"

By refusing to sign an appropriations bill that doesn't fund border security? None. Certainly nothing more egregious than congress is doing by not giving him a bill that includes the funding.

(Didn't we see this whole thing in reverse a few years ago when the Republicans in congress wouldn't vote for a budget that Obama would sign? The Republicans eventually caved as I recall. But nobody suggested that Obama's refusal to sign the budget they sent him was an impeachable offense.)

There's no Constitutional requirement that a President sign every appropriations bill that crosses his desk. Nor is there any Constitutional requirement that congress only pass bills that the President is willing to sign.

So an impasse is what we get. Ideally both sides will compromise a bit. The President has already said that he'd accept less money for border security, but the open-borders democrats refuse to budge off zero.

Regarding impeachment, it's a two-step process. The House of Representatives can vote to impeach by a simple majority. Democrats will soon hold a small majority, but it isn't clear if all democrats would join in an impeachment vote. (Some of these democrats were recently elected as moderates and even conservatives in districts that Trump won in 2016 and where a vote for impeachment wouldn't be popular with voters.) But a House vote for impeachment doesn't decide anything. It just means that the whole circus goes to the Senate which then votes on whether or not to remove the President from office. That requires a 2/3 Senate vote and Republicans have a majority in the Senate. So removal from office isn't likely to happen.

Logic, especially formal logic, is hard in the same way that mathematics is hard. It takes a certain kind of intellect to be comfortable with it right out of the gate.

I think that the best way to initially approach it is slowly, in small chunks. You can't read a formal logic text as if it was a novel. Read a subsection of a chapter. Over and over if necessary until you can really see and feel comfortable with what it's doing. Then move on to the next bit.

Another thing to try is perhaps reading one of the less technical books on philosophical logic first. (Many philosophical logic books concentrate on non-classical logics or otherwise assume that readers are already thoroughly familiar with propositional and predicate logic. They probably aren't the best choice for beginners.) Find a book that discusses logic in prose rather than symbolism, inquiring into what logic is and some of the questions and problems that arise regarding it. That way you can get your mind around what the symbolism is meant to accomplish before you actually attack the symbolism with proofs, derivations and whatnot.

Something like this perhaps (you can decide for yourself what you like):

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Logic-Introduction-Sybil-Wolfram/dp/0415023181

Regarding Mattis in politics, it's probably helpful to remember why he resigned.

He resigned because the President wanted to withdraw a token 2,000 American troops from Syria. Too few to have any real military effectiveness and served only as a trip-wire force warning potential aggressors that an assault on the Syrian Kurds would likely kill Americans and trigger a larger war with the US. But... does the US really want to go to war against Turkey or Assad? While we could probably win such a war, would it serve any American purpose?

The President believes that it isn't America's task to straighten out Syria and make it right. (It's Syria's job.) Nor it is America's job to turn the Syrian Kurds into an American protectorate for whom we become eternally responsible. We were in Syria to help defeat ISIS, and now that ISIS no longer holds any territory and its "caliphate" has been erased from the map, that's been successfully accomplished. It probably remains as an Islamist insurgency, but the locals need to be the ones to tackle that. We don't need to become another participant in Syria's all-against-all civil war.

The United States probably needs to recognize that the current chaos in Syria is in some part America's doing, if not created then certainly exacerbated by the Obama administration's childishly idealistic support for the "Syrian rebels". All we accomplished with that one was speeding Syria's devolution into another of the Middle East's failed states. So unless we are willing to impose a solution on them, which didn't work so well in Iraq and would require hundreds of thousands of troops and countless casualties if it succeeded at all, we probably shouldn't be there.

So do the democrats really want to become the party of never-ending war in the Middle East, the successor to George W. Bush's "neoconservatives"? I'm not sure that the American voters would favor that. Especially from a democratic administration that's perceived by much of the electorate as wanting to defend Syria's borders but not America's own.

says:

"No, just because I don't have an explanation of the physical universe it doesn't follow that my materialism posits a brute fact. And even if did posit a brute fact, I don't see any reason why there can't be any brute facts."

I don't either. The "brute fact" that I start with is something like reality exists. It's just kind of a given in my thinking, based on the evidence of my life. The thing that has always struck me (and motivated my interest in philosophy) is that reality is profoundly mysterious. The job of philosophy and science are to try to understand it.

Terms like "physical universe" and "materialism" create difficulties. What is the distinction between "physical" and "non-physical"? "What is "matter" and what is "materialism" really asserting?

I guess that materialism originated in the idea that the only thing that exists is tangible "stuff", not unlike the tables and the chairs. So we got those 17'th century theories of mechanistic materialism where reality consists of hard little unchanging lumps like billiard balls and that all change is the result of the dynamical motions of those atoms.

Physicalism seems to be an extension of materialism that holds that reality consists of nothing beyond the inventory of current physical theory. So objects only have physical properties, things like spatial-temporal location, mass, size, shape, motion, hardness, electrical charge, magnetism, and gravity. What's more, all of reality can be understood in terms of those kind of concepts. So reality need not be restricted to little lumps of physical matter (and time and space, I guess), but can also includes things like fields (and even spooky quantum entanglement). A difficulty that arises there is that we can't really know the outermost boundaries of 'physical' conception, what may or may not be posited by future physics.

I suppose that the best justification for a belief like this might be epistemological. Our windows to reality around us seem to be our senses. So one might want to argue that reality only consists of those things that we can know, either directly through our senses or indirectly by inference from sensory information. Empiricism may or may not embody that idea. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any good argument for why reality has to be limited to what can be known by beings like us.

So I'm inclined to think that while empiricism is reasonably good justification for the heuristic of methodological naturalism in the physical sciences, it's perhaps weaker as an ontology.

Purple Pond says:

"You cannot prove anything using only a dictionary. I repeat you cannot wholly trust the dictionary. People use words incorrectly and their meanings are often added to the dictionary."

I couldn't agree more. The first thing they tell students studying philosophy at the university level is don't try to philosophize by quoting dictionary definitions. Besides, anyone who has studied the philosophy of religion knows that scholars have been trying to define the word 'religion' for well over a century, without notable success. So I'm hugely skeptical that a dictionary editor is in any position to solve philosophical problems simply by fiat, problems that philosophers (and theologians and anthropologists) have been arguing about for generations.

I think that what this little exercise demonstrates, is that in some of the more politicized academic subjects anything will likely be accepted for publication in the journals, provided only that the paper's politics are perceived to be correct. Which arguably does tell us something about the academic standards of the subjects in question. (They are more about advocacy than academics.)

While I'm unfamiliar with the others, Hypatia has been around for a long time and is one of the most prominent feminist philosophy journals. So it isn't just the pay-to-publish crap journals.

I believe that Hypatia is published by Wiley (a major academic publisher), its editorial board includes many of the biggest names in feminist philosophy, and the journal claims that it only publishes 28% of the papers that are submitted to it. Yet...

Judge Kavanaugh has just been confirmed by the Senate and should be taking his seat on the Supreme Court on Tuesday, after the Columbus day holiday.

I don't like combining threads because doing so damages the resulting mega-thread's continuity and flow.

It makes the board more work for its readers. I find myself looking for shorter threads to post to, in part because I'm not motivated to read all the posts in the longer threads.

Another thing: One problem (on every board, not just this one) with many of the longer threads (hundreds of posts) is that they are often generated and dominated by a small number of people who appear to be having an ego-contest. So everything ends up revolving around the agenda that these people set,

Starting a new thread on a closely related topic makes it easier for different ideas to be expressed without participants feeling that they are just spitting into the wind.

Rolling threads together threatens these advantages.

asks: "In a sentence or two, what do you think it says?"

As indicated in the precis of the decision, the Court's decision has three parts. The first two address the meaning and interpretation of the Second Amendment, the third addresses the particular issue that brought this particular case before the Court. This was the District of Columbia enacting a total ban on private possession of handguns.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2-53

In justifying this, they go into great detail about the history of bearing arms, the various disputes that had arisen about it, and British common law on the subject. Under (b), they address the more contemporary (for the Framers) issue that I outlined in my earlier post:

The "militia" comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens' militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens' militia could be preserved. Pp. 22-28.

2. Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

For example, using a weapon in commission of a crime can be illegal, felons and the mentally ill can be prohibited from possessing weapons, and it isn't illegal to require some training in use of a firearm.

3. The handgun ban... violate the Second Amendment. The District's total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of arms that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense.

I think that the definitive statement on interpreting the meaning of the US 2'd Amendment might be the US Supreme Court's decision in DC v. Heller.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf

My own view:

I think that at the time the 2'd Amendment was written, the issue of whether the young United States should create a professional standing army was being hotly debated. The alternative to a standing army was hastily raising a militia of armed citizens if the need arose. This is basically what happened during the early stages of the American revolution

The 'yes' side argued (plausibly) that a force of trained professional soldiers would be far more effective in fighting wars than a hastily assembled band of citizen solders.

The 'no' side argued (plausibly) that a force of trained professional soldiers could very easily turn against the people and become an engine of tyranny. Remember that these were people for whom the American Revolution was a living memory, for whom the British army and its Hessian mercenaries represented just such an oppressive force..

So the Framers did as they often did and compromised, favoring a situation of 'checks-and-balances'. They authorized the federal government to raise a standing army (small at first), and they guaranteed the people's right to possess arms so as to be able to defend their own liberty if need be.

says:

Yes, there's a huge difference between faith in god and faith in the truth.

Contrasting "faith in god" with "faith in the truth" already seems to embody an implicit claim that "god" isn't "truth" (or that a proposition asserting God's existence isn't T) or something.

Faith in the truth only means faith in what is a coming conclusion, whatever it might be

Except that oftentimes we can't be sure that our evidence and our arguments will produce a particular conclusion, at least not without introducing a bunch of poorly justified auxiliary assumptions. It only gets more problematic when we start questioning the foundations of logic and logical inference. So oftentimes, even when the subject has nothing to do with religion, there's still going to be a bit of a 'leap of faith', however small we think it is.

faith in god is faith in a claim that has no direct correlation with any facts or logic, only the claim itself.

That's a strong assertion, if you want to insist that atheists make no claims.

says:

Sometimes I think just a definition of faith from the Atheist position would be helpful.

I agree. The question doesn't apply just to atheists, but to anyone who uses the word 'faith'.

I can't speak for all atheists and I expect that many of them use 'faith' in different ways than I use it.

But my definition would be something like:

1. Willingness to commit one's self to the truth of a belief whose justification is perceived as weak. It's similar in meaning to 'trust'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith

The word 'faith' seems to me to be ambiguous.

2. The usage that I favor has to be distinguished from another usage that imagines 'faith' as a kind of extrasensory spiritual sense, an additional channel for acquiring information. The hugely influential KJV translation of Hebrews 11:1 suggests this: "now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

The second use encounters all kinds of epistemological problems that the first doesn't. The first seems to me to be very much in accord with some current ideas in formal epistemology, in which different beliefs can have different plausibility weights and be better or worse justified. (That's what all that "Bayesian" stuff that we see everywhere in philosophy these days is all about.) 'Faith' (as I conceive of it) is just willingness to commit to the truth of propositions what have less plausibility weight than we might otherwise like.

Another idea that I want to distinguish my view from is

3. 'fideism', the idea that faith and reason are antithetical and opposed. This one is summed up by Tertullian's "...the son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd." Luther seems to have said similar things and it seems to be a recurring theme in Protestantism (and in philosophy influenced by Protestantism).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideism

Often it seems there is some inherent belief that "faith" in these chats automatically implies faith in a God.

I think that's because religion, particularly Protestant Christian religion with its ideas of "justification by faith alone", is where the word 'faith' is most typically used these days. It's out of style in most of the rest of contemporary life, and one generates angry responses when one uses it in the context of things like science.

If it is not a fact, and if reasonable cases can be made both for and against the same position, than any belief in that position, either for or against, is by definition believed by faith.

Yes, I'd agree with that.

I think that I'd rather say that the facts are typically going to be whatever they are regardless of what we happen to think about them.

And while I suspect that many/most of our beliefs are poorly justified if we poke deeply enough into their foundations (poking into the foundations is what I perceive philosophy's job to be), that doesn't mean that some beliefs can't be better justified than others. I think that's even going to be true regarding religious beliefs.

asks:

Well, why not? Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event?

That raises the problem of time asymmetry. Why is there a distinction between the past and future, in a way that there isn't for left and right? The most obvious difference seems to be that causation appears to only work in the past => future direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

So, why doesn't retrocausation occur? Why doesn't the future determine the past just as much as the past seems to determine the future?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality

One difficulty that might arise if that happened is that we would get paradoxical loops such as those imagined in time-travel science fiction. So if causation behaved in a temporally symmetrical fashion, reality might take the form of a cosmic-scale superposition of possibility states. (Primordial chaos.)

Another consideration: It seems that the 'laws of physics' are almost all time-symmetrical. They work just as well in the future => past direction as in the past => future direction. So (perhaps) the asymmetry of time isn't inherent in the underlying physical 'laws'. That suggests that perhaps time asymmetry is the result of initial conditions.

So maybe (speculatively) the reason that our universe exists at all is that something, some local condition, forced all the causal chains nearby to propagate in the same temporal direction. The 'Big Bang' seems to fulfill that requirement. All causal chains in our universe seem to propagate away from it. Creating conditions favorable for a universe of to crystalize into actuality.

But conceivably (and speculatively) causation can still propagate in the pastward direction for very short intervals. So causal loops still occur on the microscale with superpositions of probability states. Maybe that's why quantum mechanics seems weird and why there's a distinction between physics on the microscale and the macroscale.

It's all just speculation, of course. (I'm a longtime science fiction reader.)

More speculation: Perhaps our universe is akin to a shockwave, propagating away from whatever caused it (the 'Big Bang'). Behind the shockwave lies the past, determined and frozen in amber. Ahead of the shockwave lies a space containing many superimposed possibilities. And perhaps the shockwave itelf is the present, 'now', and we are kind of surfing on a giant 'collapse of the wave function' as it expands into the future. Which would accord very nicely with our intuitions about time.

If there was any truth to any of this, it would seem to suggest an expanding-block model of time.

Purple Pond says:

What kind of evidence could there be for supernatural phenomena? As an atheist I'm trying to think of examples of what would convince me that there is a god and that the physical world is not all there is.

It's an interesting question. Thanks for starting the thread.

There seem to be three different things mentioned there: 'supernatural phenomena', 'there is a god' and 'the physical world is not all there is'. Those aren't all synonymous and might involve different evidences.

For example, the existence of mathematics might (arguably, for mathematical Platonists) be evidence that 'the physical world isn't all there is'.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/mathplat/

And things like hauntings or "psychic phenomena" might (arguably, if they really happen) be evidence of 'supernatural phenomena', which may or may not be a subset of 'the physical world isn't all there is' idea, while not necessarily implying 'there is a god'.

How about miracles? ... A miracle points to a divine being with a purpose violating natural law to produce a desired outcome for certain people. The problem is that if the laws of nature could be violated then they aren't laws at all.

I'm not sure that a worldview that endorses methodological naturalism could recognize a miracle even if its nose (do worldviews have noses?) was rubbed in it. Methodological naturalism demands that natural explanations be sought for natural events. (This is the approach that modern science has successfully taken.) So even if a miracle in your (and David Hume's) violation of the natural order sense occurred, the methodological naturalist would assume that it must have a natural explanation, even if it's unknown at the moment. So a research program might be launched to find it. So the most that a methodological naturalist would see is an anomalous (for the moment) physical event whose natural/physical cause is still not understood.

Interestingly (to me, anyway), St. Augustine had a rather similar understanding of miracles. His idea was that God originally created all of the laws of nature at the beginning for all time, and doesn't act capriciously, changing his mind and violating them with miracles.

So what accounts for miracles that seemingly violate the order of nature? Augustine's idea was that a miracle isn't really a violation of the order of nature at all, but rather a violation of our understanding of the order of nature, a violation of what we expect to happen. (Hence his theory is called the 'epistemic theory of miracles'.)

Put another way, alongside the big and obvious laws of nature that people learn today in physics class, there are lots of little small-print ones like the numbered notes at the back of a scholarly book, obscure minor principles that God wrote into the cosmic plan, creating exceptions that God knew (in his divine omniscience) that he would need later.

I'll speculate that this idea, coming from an authority as mighty as Augustine, might have helped justify medieval sorcery. The sorcerer was just somebody with access to all the obscure small-print laws of nature, inscribed now in his grimoire, his book of spells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_theory_of_miracles

Streetlight says:

Not enough indifference.

Why must atheists be indifferent? I'm certainly not, for at least two good reasons:

1. If theistic religious claims were true, it's hard to imagine any other fact being more important. No other consideration would even come close. I personally weight that possibility fairly low, so it doesn't really move me all that much. But...

2. The philosophy of religion provides philosophy with some of its most interesting problem cases, both metaphysically and epistemologically.

Still treats the problem of God's existence as a legitimate question, even if answered in the negative.

Which suggests that you are assuming that it isn't a legitimate question. That needs more argument if you want to convince me.

Michael says:

Can you understand that science and logic don't apply to the matter of faith?

Epistemology certainly seems to apply, at least if the faithful one is making propositional claims about what does and doesn't exist and what is and isn't true. And epistemology is joined at the hip with logic (in ways that remain a bit mysterious).

A problem that I see with divorcing faith from logic and evidenciary justification entirely is that it leaves the content of faith seemingly indistinguishable from the content of psychotic delusions.

I'm inclined to define 'faith' as something like 'willingness to commit one's self to the truth of a belief when that belief is imperfectly justified.' In that sense, we are exhibiting faith in our beliefs almost every moment of our lives.

Defined this way, religious faith is just a rather extreme subset of faith-in-general. And obviously many of our imperfectly justified beliefs are nevertheless better justified than others.

S says:

I'm an atheist.

I am too, in some of my moods. Other times, I prefer to think of myself as an agnostic.

But what does that mean? What kind of atheist am I? It means that I don't believe that God exists, and it means that I don't believe that any god or gods going by any other name or even no name at all exist.

That sounds like an expression of strong atheism. I share it when it comes to Allah, Yahweh, Vishnu and all of the named deities of religious myth. I don't believe that they exist either, though I acknowledge that my reasons are imperfect and that I might turn out to be wrong. I don't believe that the Bible, the Quran or the Vedas are divine revelations and I don't believe that Jesus was God's incarnation or that Muhammed was God's prophet.

In other cases, I accept that it is possible that God exists.

I'm inclined to think that way when it comes to the arguments of natural theology: First-cause, source of cosmic order, why there is something rather than nothing, and so on. To me, these are among the most fundamental metaphysical problems, and I don't have a clue what the answers might be. I don't think that any human being knows the answers, or even whether there are answers. This is when I enter into my agnostic mood.

However, there is no case I know of where I think it would be right to conclude that there is a good enough basis to believe that God exists.

The problem with natural theology is that it delivers us to a set of hypothetical metaphysical functions. Tradition has long associated them with God, but I'm skeptical about that connection. Whatever fulfills the metaphysical functions, if anything, needn't be divine in any religious sense. The 'Big Bang' might arguably represent a first cause, but it isn't something that most people would want to fall on their knees and worship, or that people would consider holy.

So my view is that natural theology's metaphysical functions, should they exist, still aren't "good enough basis to believe that God exists" as you put it.

Absence of evidence can be, and in some cases is, evidence of absence.

I agree. And more rhetorically, it's certainly good reason to say that 'There's nothing that persuades me'.

I will disagree with you a bit, and say that I don't want to entirely dismiss things like religious experience or purported miracles as evidence. But I certainly do agree that I remain unpersuaded by it, and think that there are serious problems with these kind of evidences. So I'm more inclined to think that there is evidence for 'the supernatural' we might say, although I consider it very weak evidence and remain unmoved by it.

I wrote:

It [science] certainly seems to be based on a whole lot of assumptions that haven't been conclusively nailed-down.

Michael writes:

Quite possibly it seems like that to you. But that's because you don't know what science is.

I'd rather not get into a pissing contest with you.

I'm just pointing out that the problems of induction, confirmation, natural kinds, substance and properties, parts and wholes, scientific realism, intertheoretical relations, reduction, emergence, parsimony and simplicity, heuristics, inference to the best explanation, and even what explanation is and what it's trying to accomplish are still open philosophical questions in the philosophy of science or metaphysics.

As are the nature of space and time, modality, the ontological nature of unactualized possibilities, counterfactuals, dispositions, regularity and necessitarian theories of natural law and providing a satisfactory account of causality.

And there's the whole cloud of problems surrounding abstract objects, what mathematics is, mathematical epistemology and the relationship of mathematics to physical reality. Similar problems arise with logic, and by extension with reason itself.

In other words, just about anything that scientists think about turns profoundly mysterious whenever somebody starts poking into the foundations.

Obviously scientists can typically do their work without worrying a whole lot about the philosophy of science and most don't. But more fundamental issues do sometimes intrude into the scientific consciousness when problematic issues arise, as with the advent of quantum mechanics.

No, science isn't faith-based.

It certainly seems to be based on a whole lot of assumptions that haven't been conclusively nailed-down.

[The laws of physics only have]...applicability only with regard to physical things and events in this physical universe. And, even then, physicists aren't even sure if the same physical laws that apply in this part of the universe apply in other, distant, parts of the same universe.

Astrophysics certainly seems to make that assumption.

It's reasonable for particular physicists to believe that currently accepted physical laws won't be overturned.

Why is it reasonable? There would seem to be some uniformity-of-nature assumption sneaking in there. As David Hume argued pretty convincingly, it's hard to justify that without circularity.

You haven't read much about science.

I figured that mentioning science in conjunction with faith might gore some sacred-cows.

A physical law is a current working-assumption.

And an article of faith to the extent that people are willing to commit to its truth. Which we do every time we fly in an airplane or rely on technology.

Pattern Chaser says: "An atheist who asserts the non-existence of God is occupying a faith position, in exactly the same way that a believer who asserts the existence of God is occupying a faith position."

That's basically why I consider myself an agnostic.

It's actually a bit more complicated. When it comes to the named deities of monotheistic religious tradition: Yahweh, Allah and Vishnu, that crowd, I'm an atheist. I believe that none of these figures corresponds to anything in reality. (I can't 'prove' it though.)

But when it comes to the metaphysical functions associated with natural theology: first-cause, ultimate ontological ground of being, source of cosmic order, why there is something rather than nothing, and so on, I have to admit that I don't have a clue. I think that agnosticism is probably the strongest and most justifiable position to take on these kind of issues, but in real everyday life we are often forced to stick our necks out a lot further.

Pattern Chaser: "Both assertions lack evidence to support them. So the link between atheism and faith is exactly as strong as the link between theism and faith. Because it is the same link, existing for the same reason."

I'd define 'faith' as willingness to commit to the truth of a belief in the absence of sound justification for the belief's truth. And I think that religious or not, we do that every day.

Atheists often like to associate themselves with science. (As if some of science's prestige might rub off on them.) But it seems to me that science is hugely faith-based. It believes in the existence and universal applicability of things called 'laws of physics', it believes that these 'laws' (the religious origin of that idea should be obvious) will hold true into the future and not be repealed a second from now (problems of induction). Justification for belief in these laws is typically just a small set of experimental results consistent with the hypothesized law. Physicists fill chalkboards with obscure hieroglyphs, without much concern with what mathematics is, what its foundations are, how human beings know about it in the first place, or what it's precise relationship is to physical reality. Everyone is proud of their use of logic and their employment of reason, without much interest in what justifies these things. (How could logic be logically justified without circularity?) They trust that their sensory experience provides true and reliable knowledge of the external world...

I don't think that human beings could life their lives without faith in this sense, faith in many of these kind of fundamental propositions.

What kind of 'presentism' are we talking about here? In the philosophy of time, 'presentism' is the view that only the present exists. While the past once existed, it no longer exists. And the future will exist, but doesn't presently exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_presentism

Most of the numbered points in the O.P. don't seem to address this. They look to me like ideas suggesting that the universe must have only had a finite duration since its origin.

I support secularism and I don't personally like or feel comfortable with hard-core divine-command-theorists.

But having said that, I think that many secular voices are just as dangerous (certainly obnoxious) with their own sense of moral righteousness.

Our contemporary culture can only be described as "Neo-Puritan". It's non-stop perjorative moral judgments directed at anyone who dares to disagree: "Racist!", "Bigot!" "Fascist!" "Homophobe!" "Xenophobe!", "Misogynist!"... and on and on.

Most of that doesn't seem to be any better supported or justified than the moral opinions of the worst religious types. In one case it's the Bible (or the Quran or whatever), on the other hand it's... what?... personal intuition? Gut feeling?

While I'm a religious agnostic and most emphatically favor secularism, I don't think that tearing moral judgmentalism away from its historical religious roots and just leaving it floating in the middle of the air with no justification at all really moves us to a better place.

I don't believe that the reason why so many people voted for Trump was that they thought that he was a traditional literary hero. (Is that why anyone votes for particular politicians?) They voted for him because he seemed to represent their interests and addressed issues that they cared about. (Their nation, their history, their traditions and their identity.) Issues that the other candidates ignored.

Erik stated it very well:

"Seems like Trump is part of a wider global or at least Western trend, in which 'average' people are trying to gain some control over the direction of their countries within the context of an increasingly globalized, neoliberal world order. Outsourcing of manufacturing jobs + mass immigration + increased automation + cultural shifts have combined to create a sense of disorientation and alienation for the masses."

I couldn't agree more, that's what's defining the new contemporary politics all over the Western world. (With close analogues elsewhere.) It's called "democracy".

Philosopher19 says:

"I see what you're saying. In order to better communicate what I'm saying, let's leave the concept of perfection for now and perhaps come back to it later. Consider the following premises:

(1) There is existence/Existence exists"

Ok, I can accept that.

"(2) Everything that exists, does so only in existence"

I'm not sure what you are saying there. It kind of sounds like you are sneaking in the idea that existence is a kind of space in which everything that exists is located. I'm not convinced that's the best way to think about existence.

"(3) We are fully dependent on existence"

We wouldn't exist if we didn't exist. But I don't really want to think about existence as something separate from existing things upon which they are all dependent.

"(4) All minds are limited to what existence allows"

We can certainly imagine counterfactual possibilities that don't actually exist. I can think of a square circle, even if I can't visualize it with my mind's eye. I can imagine Madrid being the capital of France.

"(5) Given 4, anything that is either rational/comprehensible/understandable, necessarily belongs to existence (existence accommodates it; as in either it is necessarily existent, or existence has the potential to create it or produce it."

Are you including the realm of possibility in what you call "existence", so that anything imaginable must therefore be a possibility and all possibilities are somehow real?

I'm unclear on what the relationship is between conceivability, possibility and existence. I think that we might be sliding over some serious metaphysical questions there.

"On the other hand, anything that is either irrational or incomprehensible is necessarily non-existent (existence does not accommodate it."

I'm not convinced that an organism's limits of cognition define the limits of ontological possibility, even if the organism is human. That idea certainly isn't true for earthworms, cockroaches or chimpanzees. So I'm just skeptical that human beings represent the apex of all possible cognition. There may be space-aliens out there that are as far beyond humans as humans are beyond clams, able to conceive of aspects of reality that we can never even imagine. Which would suggest the possibility of something incomprehensible (to us) that nevertheless exists. One could make the same sort of argument for any and all cognizers, leaving open the possibility that there are aspects of reality that nothing that exists can conceive.

"(6) Omnipotence and omniscience, are rational concepts that we have an understanding of. So Existence must accomodate these concepts. As highlighted by 5, to deny this is to commit to the paradox of something coming from nothing."

I certainly don't want to agree that anything that I can imagine must therefore exist. I think that we have the power to generate ideas, but that doesn't guarantee that something corresponding to the idea exists.

"Therefore either

6a) The potential is there for something to become omnipotent and omniscient, or 6b) Something is necessarily omnipotent and omniscient."

Just because we can (supposedly) imagine omnipotence and omniscience?

Just because we can imagine things with varying degrees of power, and can therefore imagine power increasing more and more, doesn't have to suggest that we can actually picture a being with infinite power. We are just imaging a scale (of degrees of power) and an operation on the scale (extending it). We aren't really forming any clear conception of what might lie at the end and be the result of the operation.

And even if we could imagine such a thing, imagining it wouldn't guarantee that it has to exist.

What's more, what about the familiar old chestnut: Can God (supposedly omnipotent) create a task too difficult for God to perform? If he can create an impossible task, then there's something he can't do (the task), and if he can't create such a task, there's something he can't do (create the task). So omnipotence would seem to fall prey to logical problems much as 'square circle' does.

I certainly applaud the effort that you put into your argument (which reminds me of Aquinas, which is not a bad thing by any means). But I'm not personally buying it, for the reasons I suggested up above.

It might be more accurate to preface #1 and #3 with "A popular theological doctrine holds that..."

So #4 would be dependent on the truth of that particular theological doctrine and on the truth of our moral judgement expressed in #2. It doesn't necessarily hold for any and all conceptions of God.

But yeah, assuming the initial assumptions #1 through #3, I agree that your conclusion does seem to follow.

"In a nutshell, Descartes' cosmological argument for the existence of God stated that he had an idea of a supremely perfect being. Since he himself was not a supremely perfect being, he could not have been the cause of the idea of a supremely perfect being. Therefore, the existence of a supremely perfect being was necessary to make the idea at all possible."

That argument probably didn't originate with Descartes. It looks very similar to the fourth of Aquinas' "Five Ways".

In Descartes' version, it seems to depend on whether or not Descartes really did have an idea of a supremely perfect being in mind.

I'd be inclined to say that human beings like us are able to imagine many properties and qualities that hold true in differing degrees. From size, weight, hardness or velocity all the way to vaguer things like goodness and beauty. Once we have defined a scale or hierarchy of values, we can imagine something possessing whatever quality we are imagining to the utmost "supreme" degree. We do the same thing with infinity in mathematics.

In none of these cases do we really seem to have a clear and distinct idea in mind of what such a thing would be like. We aren't really imagining some ultimate number at the end of all integers, nor are we really imagining a perfect deity. (Many theologies would insist that the true nature of the deity is beyond all human conception.) We are just imagining a scale and an operation on the scale (extending it), then imagining the operation being applied without bounds without having a clear idea of what would result.

I think that we are our minds and personalities. I don't buy the view that we are something separate, ghosts-in-the-machine, a soul that rides around in our head behind our eyes and steers us as if we were meat automobiles.

The way I see it, we are the inner process that's running in each of our nervous systems. That inner process does seem to be self-modifying as it's running. Its inputs don't just include products of the senses but also at least some of its own states.

I guess that I'd define free will as freedom from external coercion by anything external to ourselves (as outlined in the preceding paragraph.). If I behave freely, it doesn't have to mean that I'm behaving randomly. It seems to mean instead that my decisions and actions are the result of my own desires, motives and cognitive process. I wasn't coerced into acting as I did by any external force.

I'm not convinced that religion has a single purpose. (Or a single definition, for that matter.)

The 'primal' sort of religion seems to be about inducing whatever cosmic powers might exist to bestow favors like good fortune, abundant harvests, healthy children or victory in battle. To achieve that end, people would perform sacrifices, utter prayers and perform ceremonies before undertaking activities.

Later religion seemed to place more emphasis on rescuing people from death. Heavens became more pronounced. Ethical concerns were highlighted, since entry into whatever heaven they imagined typically required meeting some standard and passing some sort of judgement.

And this gradually expanded into other more esoteric sorts of salvation, such as the Buddhist salvation from 'dukkha'.

There often seems to be a metaphysical aspect to religion, a feeling that it facilitates access to transcendent realities that exceed the conditions of earthly life.

How does one quantify the 'size' of insults? By how inclusive they are? By how divisive they are? By how emotionally aroused we become?

Part of the problem here is ambiguity in the meaning of the word 'men'.

Does 'men' refer to 'mankind', to humanity in general? Or does it refer to males specifically?

If we interpret 'men' in 'All men are fools' as referring to all human beings, then that one seems to be saying that all human beings are fools. Everyone is in the same boat, seemingly falling short of some perhaps unrealistic imaginary standard.

If we interpret it as saying all males are fools, then it would seem to be creating a fundamental value hierarchy within the class of humanity. I guess that I'd personally say that the 'men means males' interpretation of 'All men are fools' is the most insulting. It doesn't seem to leave any possibility of being a male and not being a fool.

"All fools are men' doesn't universalize over 'all men' as easily.

Interpreting 'man' to mean 'mankind', 'All fools are men' would seem to be saying that only humans have the capacity to be fools, not that all of them are. I don't think that's particularly insulting.

Even if we read 'men' to mean males, it's still possible that the vast majority of males aren't fools.

And if we preceded the sentence with something about genius and foolishness being closely related, then that might turn the whole thing on its head.

The first rule might arguably be, 'Treat the opinions of philosophers merely as suggestions for further discussion, not as religious-style revelations that must be accepted merely on the philosopher's authority'. (That includes you too, Wittgenstein.)

That particular first rule probably applies self-referentially to the rule itself. Which might be why philosophers rarely seem to progress from A to B.

"The implication of indirect realism is that what we experience is a model of the world, not the world as it is." -- Harry Hindu

My concern is that the idea that what "we experience" is a model of the world suggests a homunculus theory, in which there's a little man (our soul) inside our heads that perceives the 'model of the world' as if it was a TV monitor. Pushing too hard on that kind of theory leads to problems with solipsism.

I think that I'd rather say that we do perceive the world outside our heads, and that we do so by gathering information about it through our senses (and probably through the use of our interpretive activities as well). The sum total of the information that we possess about the world (along with added interpretive stuff like assumed causal relationships) may indeed resemble a model, But the knowledge that we possess about the world isn't the object of our awareness. The object of our awareness is the world. It's just that we don't know everything about it and some of what we think we know might be wrong.

"Growing block seems to adopt the worst features of both views. Not sure what problem is solved by the block history, but the lack of block-future seems to be an attempt to get around one's discomfort with the free will implications."

--NoAxioms

In some of my philosophical moods, I kind of like the growing block idea. The 'block history' captures the idea that the past seems to be fixed. Whatever happened, happened. The idea that the block grows into the future captures the idea that the future is contingent, it doesn't exist in a fixed block-like form yet.

(I guess that the plausibility of that idea will depend on one's views on physical determinism.)

Sometimes I'm inclined to speculate about the future in vaguely quantum-mechanical terms as an almost infinite collection of superimposed possibilities. That captures the idea that the future can evolve in different ways. In this kind of scheme, the present moment would represent the 'collapse of the wave function'. And the past would be the resulting fixed actuality.

"lf plato thinks only philosophers should be kings then he probably didn't have any idea of democracy."

--"TheMadFool"

I think that Plato knew about democracy since Athens where he lived was (at times) the prototypical democracy, ruled by its citizens physically gathered in an assembly.

In the Republic at least, Plato was an opponent of democracy which he believed was rule-by-the-rabble. What he wanted to do was restore the older oligarchical idea of rule by an aristocracy, except this time not a warrior-aristocracy but an aristocracy of intellectual merit (defined in his rather transcendent terms, of course).

Hence rule by philosophers. Those who habitually think in abstractions, those able to intuit the pure Forms of things, particularly the highest Form of the "Good".

It's basically the same dichotomy that we see creating no end of stresses and strains in Europe and the United States today, in the political tension between the will of the people who want to rule themselves and make their own decisions (the ideal of democracy, often dismissed as 'populism') on one hand, and rule by a class of supposedly superior elites in the capital on the other, composed of university professors, scientists, government officials, business leaders, celebrities and journalists (the 'authorities', those supposedly best qualified to lead everyone else). .

Here's my comments on your premises:

P1. The worm theory requires that we are temporally extended beings.

OK, I'll buy that.

P2. if we are temporally extended beings, then we must have all of our experiences at every time in which we exist together.

Why? That seems like too strong an assumption to me.

Just because something is temporally extended needn't imply that every temporal slice of the extended thing is identical to every other temporal slice. Differences between one slice and another would represent change in this this kind of scheme, and we obviously change during the course of our lives. (That introduces the problem of how to define personal identity. It clearly isn't strong logical identity.)

Here's an analogy: My arm is spatially extended and it has fingers down at its end, but it doesn't need to have fingers all along its entire length.

P3. Our experience is limited to only one time.

I'm going to argue with this one too.

Assuming that we are conscious throughout our lives (which isn't likely to be true) we should probably say that our consciousness at time T-1 is consciousness of T-1, while our consciousness at time T-2 is consciousness of T-2. So we can say that our time-slices are experiencing throughout, but only experiencing the time in which that particular slice resides (plus accumulated memories).

So I'd say that I don't see any contradiction in your premises and your C doesn't seem to me to follow.

If we replace P2 with the expectation that different time slices will differ from each other depending on the changes that the temporally extended being undergoes during the course of its existence, and replace P3 with the expectation that the experience represented by a particular time-slice is limited to awareness of that time-slice, then the worm-theory would still seem to work.

Maybe I'm not understanding the distinction between worm-theory and stage-theory properly. It's conceivable that my amendments to your premises and my interpreting personal identity in something other than a strong logical way has moved me towards being a stage theorist and I'm actually conceding your point without realizing it.

But it seems to me that if we imagine worm-theory as requiring that each cross-section of the worm be absolutely identical to every other cross-section of the worm, that reduces worm-theory to a straw man. I'm not sure that anyone who has proposed this conceptual model has argued for such a thing. They acknowledge that change happens over time and that temporal cross-sections of the same individual can differ radically. (Me at one week old and me at 80 years old.) Certainly anatomical cross-sections through spatially extended biological worms won't all be anatomically identical either.

Does imagination play a role in philosophy?

I'd say 'Of course'. We use imagination to generate examples, concoct problem cases, conduct thought-experiments, invent novel arguments and probably in of most of the things philosophers do.

In my own thinking, the answer to the question "does a God exist?" depends on how 'God' is being defined, on what we are using the word to mean.

1. If 'God' is used in the manner of natural theology to refer to whatever the answers might be to the biggest metaphysical questions -- 'Why is there something rather than nothing?', 'What was the first cause?', 'What is the fundamental substrate of being itself?' 'Where did the universe's rational order come from?' -- then I would have to call myself an agnostic. I don't know the answers and what's more, I don't think that any human being does. I'm not convinced that the 'something-from-nothing' question is even answerable in principle.

2. If 'God' is used to refer to particular figures from human religious mythology, Allah, Yahweh, Krishna or whoever, I just think that it's exceedingly unlikely that whatever the ultimate principles of reality might be, that they will correspond to one of these personalized anthropomorphic figures. So when it comes to the deities of the religions, I'm essentially an atheist I guess.

I can't comment on the Simmel quote, since I don't know its larger context. He doesn't seem to be talking about money so much as about value. There are lots of non-monetary values, such as aesthetic and moral values, truth value and so on.

Regarding money, I'm inclined to perceive dollars (or any unit of currency) as votes on the distribution of labor and resources. The more subjectively valuable a good or service is to us, the more dollars we are willing to spend to acquire it. When we spend money we are voting on the value of whatever it is that other people are doing.

The thing is, few of us are able to meet all of our needs and desires by our own efforts. We inevitably require the assistance of others. So why should other people help us when they have unmet needs and desires of their own?

Money solves that problem. If something somebody does is of value to me, then my paying them for doing it provides that person with the means to elicit the aid of others in meeting their needs.

In other words, money serves as a kind of social glue in large-scale societies where people don't all know each other and aren't all connected by blood ties and family loyalties.

Spending money is like a continuous real-time poll on what those around us should be doing with their time, where the number of votes we have to cast is a function of how valuable other people think our own activities are.

I agree with Arkady that new religions are still appearing. There are lots of 'new age' groups and religious ideas that have emerged in the last few decades. The LSD excitement in the late 1960's/early 1970's had many people trying to achieve chemical transcendence. What I call the 'flying saucer faith' seems to me to be a new current of quasi-religious myth that seemingly emerged in the mid 20th century, repackaging divine and demonic visitations in pseudo-scientific form. Marxism might be another more apocalyptic quasi-religious eruption since the 1840's or so, announcing an inexorable unfolding of history leading to an ultimate paradisical kingdom of (no)God.

I'm inclined to speculate that belief in gods is likely a by-product of our innate human 'theory of mind'.

We evolved as social beings, able to live cooperatively in groups with others of our kind. That requires that we be able understand others, intuit or otherwise model their psychological states and attribute intention to their actions. It's probably advantageous in an evolutionary sense to be able to attribute intention and purpose to the behavior of animals as well.

My speculation is that early man tended to think about everything, about all of nature, in the same way. So they attributed psychological states and intentions to inanimate nature as well as to what we would call sentient creatures. Thinking that way just came naturally to them. Storms, thunder and lightning were perceived as manifestations of some exceedingly powerful being's anger. If a tree branch fell and hit a hut, people wondered what had motivated it, or the unseen power that controlled it, to want to do that.

So we get animism and the idea that all of reality is inhabited by mind-like spirits and that all natural events are purposive. People begged, pleaded and sought to buy off the spirits that seemed to control their lives and fates. Rituals and sacrifices appeared. Stories about the spirits and their actions elaborated and were told with great solemnity around campfires, gradually becoming traditional myths.

Another tendency visible in the history of religion is the tendency for supernatural powers to become more and more grand and to recede higher and higher into heaven over time. People want the spiritual powers that they worship and ally themselves with to be as powerful and as transcendent as possible. So the spirit they worship no longer inhabits a particular mountaintop, but lives high above in the sky and only manifests "himself" on the mountaintop in storms or when laws need to be promulgated in Sinai.

Gradually, often in historical times as philosophy is beginning to appear in cultures, the idea appears that there is only one animating spirit that controls and is responsible for everything that happens in this worldly plane below the heavens. We see that in movement towards monotheism in India, the Middle East and in the appearance of Greek ideas of monotheism.

The highly rationalistic Greeks in particular were impressed by the idea that a single logical order or 'logos' is evident in the behavior of all of nature. So some of them (the Stoics and the Middle Platonists for example) imagined a single transcendent mind that creates and imposes the order. Christian and Muslim Neoplatonism seized on that idea and tried to merge it with their founding myths. We even see a non-psychologized version of it in the form and structure of modern mathematical physics.



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