Philosophy Archive

It is not uncommon these days to see people protesting the way authorities are “violating their freedom” by enforcing things like social distancing, encouraging the wearing of masks in public, or not allowing businesses like restaurants to openly conduct business. This type of protest is much more common in the United States than it is

This post is in response to my recent exposure to the theories of the physicist Tom Campbell. Campbell is a scientist who has worked at NASA and elsewhere, and has put forward a “theory of everything” he calls the “Big TOE” (theory of everything). As I understand it, the core claim of this theory is

The philosophical rejection of the notion of Free Will comes first and foremost out of the scientific belief in determinism: that all events, attitudes, background conditions, have a cause, and that therefore it does not make sense to take “credit” or “blame” for our attitudes, our level of intelligence, or, in the extreme, our actions.

In his book Breaking The Spell, philosopher and noted atheist Daniel Dennett discusses (at some length) the difference between “belief in God” and “belief in belief in God”. This may sound like some philosopher’s tedious exercise in hair-splitting, but the fact is, this is actually an interesting and important distinction. Over the years I have

Some things I’ve been reading recently have led me to look again at my previous posts about morality (here and here) and attempt to clarify some of the ideas presented there. “Morality” is a confusing topic, debated for centuries by philosophers and theologians, (and not seriously thought about by me for the last thirty years)

In a world where we increasingly rely on scientific investigation to answer important questions about the world around us, the use of special documents called “scripture” by religious leaders and their billions of followers is puzzling. Religious people just assume scriptures have some special (dare I say, magical) powers that ordinary writings don’t have. But

Even a casual viewing of a television show like 100 Huntley Street gives the impression that religion (or belief in god) is almost all about feeling good. People sit around telling each other about their personal experiences. There’s a tremendous amount of smiling, punctuated with earnest empathizing. Often these experiences involve some personal crisis –

It is surprising how many people believe that without a god to offer an objective basis for morality, there can simply be no trustworthy right or wrong. This has both a positive side and a negative one, and both are confused and confusing. On the positive side is the assumption that god’s existence somehow legitimizes

Author’s note: “This is the beginning of a series of posts about religious non-belief. I don’t like the term ‘atheist’ because it sounds so certain. So I use the term ‘skeptic regarding religious belief’ to denote the position of non-belief. The skeptical position that I take is that there is no good reason to believe