Philosophy Now Forum

Soren, I think you are confusing: There is no evidence of god. And: There is evidence of no god. It is nonsense to demand evidence of no evidence, and I don't think anyone is claiming the latter. Nope. Not even remotely confused. Anyone who makes an affirmative statement of some kind needs to expla...

Thanks for all the lengthy responses...I find them all interesting. This one is controversial for many...but I say emphatically HELL NO :!: There are so many christians in my class so I'm sure I'll get backlash. I have to say that everyone has rewritten the bible, Koran,....how can anyone claim it ...

Sorry: I'm very poor at detecting the sexual orientation of droids.

I'd have thought being moral is about oneself not others? Oh no...of course not. This is the moral solipsist fallacy. Why would we even bother with the category "moral" if you were the only person on earth? If there were no God, no other people, and not even any other animals that one reg...

Everything in society will find its root cause in man, Ah, now this is the interesting bit. It may be true, or it may not be; but let's suppose for a minute that you are 100% right. Can you venture, on that basis, an explanation of why humankind is the source of what we call "evil"? I tho...

Soren wrote: ...Prove me wrong. This won't get you very far. One of my twin daughters was teasing the other about her belief in Father Christmas; I told them that he is a spirit that enters all the daddies in the world. Prove me wrong. Easily. False analogy. Weak logic. Reductio ad Absurdum , an ob...

Don't thank him to quickly. However well intended, his reply is an irrelevant one. The question is not whether or not religion is about faith, but whether your belief that no one has "sacred scripture" is a faith belief. It appears now that it is. You don't know at all...you've chosen to b...

Astutely observed, thedoc, and concisely put. The strong claim (i.e. that no religion has a genuinely "sacred scripture" from God) is R2's claim. Thus he takes on himself a burden to show the proof for his assertion. As for the others, he gives us no reason to think he knows whether or not...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that no one can "ask" god if he wrote any of them therefore the answer is no. What is your evidence to support this statement? It can't be simply the fact that you personally don't know God...no one would bother to contest that, but it wouldn't tell again...

Pardon? Why do we have to be "specially morally privileged"? Why not just that we are a being that concerns itself with being ethical and moral. Because the mere observation that "we feel ethical and moral interest" is not a justification of our moral and ethical status any more...

My "concern" is limited to the question of how we know what we know, rather than to advocacy of a particular atheist society. I just like to see suppositions connect with conclusions. So I'm just noting that given what I have called the "slender" or "modest" version of ...

Kind of irrelevant, R2. I'm not sure how the failures of the Mormons are supposed to be damning to every other belief system...unless you somehow know they're secretly all Mormons, in some sense. And Mormons aren't committed to the Koran, nor Muslims to Torah. So it seems to me you've got apples and...

Surely it can assume Humanism? Well, surely one can "assume" anything: the question that is more important is "Can it justify that assumption?" So we must ask what feature of the atheist view supports any conviction that human beings are specially morally privileged beings. Put ...

There is something interesting here, but also some things that are not quite clear. Perhaps specifying might help the discussion. Religion is part of the same forces that create wars and solidarity, love and hatred. Those will be around always because they are part of human essence, and in some way ...

"He who has loved many women
Has loved none..."

Discuss.