Here is an old puzzle: Imagine a heap of sand. Now imagine taking one grain of sand off the top. It’s still a heap, right? Now keep going. At each removal of a grain the heap remains a heap until you get to one grain. One grain isn’t a heap so something changed. It’s just not clear when it changed. That’s vague. Here’s another puzzle I wrote about the other day (I got it from Peter van Inwagen’s book, Material Beings). Imagine yourself as a freshly fertilized egg. Call it A. The single cell then becomes two cells, A and B. Now imagine that B fails to make it and…
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God and Government
“we are obedient to a power that is not only higher than the current government, but a power that was the basis of our government” (Mike Huckabee) Tony Blair was most forceful on this point: I don’t do God, he said. Lately, western governments have followed suit. Talking about God and government is just too messy. For a start, there are too many divinities and they all say slightly different things. And then there are militant atheists for whom the mention of anything that has a whiff of divinity is likely to get you trolled and it certainly diminishes your chances of getting their vote. So what’s a god to…
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Augustine’s Evil-Evil Distinction
If you tell a lie, you commit an immoral act. But what if you just believe something that turns out to be false? Is that evil? Augustine thought so. He didn’t think an intententional lie was the same as an unintentional false belief but both are evil. How so? Surely a mistaken belief isn’t evil, is it? Augustine distinguished between moral evil and metaphysical evil. Augustine thought that to believe some false proposition may not be a sin if it is believed unintentionally, but it is nonetheless a metaphysical evil, a lack, or a corruption, of the good. Lying, on the other hand, is a moral evil since it is…
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Eight Great Lewis Quotes
C.S. Lewis knew how deal with human pretentiousness: cut it out by the root. In Lewis’ hands our self deceptions are like some hidden terrorist cell who finds itself under the precise assault of special forces. For example, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis unearths some particularly well bunkered little wickednesses: We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts and make the opposite mistake about our virtues–like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those hum-drum,…
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Analogies and Inverse Probabilities
The classic argument from design is as follows: The universe is ordered. Unless there is a God, it is unlikely that the universe would be ordered. So, given the orderliness of the universe, God is likely to exist. The argument has intuitive force. Designed things have designers. Order is a result of design so our observation of order leads naturally to the conclusion that the universe has been designed by a designer. Here is a good criticism from inverted probability. Simply put, to invert probability is to take an argument such as the design argument and switch it around. So, A. “given the existence of God, the universe is likely…
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The Endless Search For Empirical Evidence Against Folk Psychology
Many arguments for physicalism, the view that all that exists is describable in terms of physics, assume that, at some point, there will be enough convincing empirical evidence to show that folk psychology, the view that mental stuff or souls exist, is false. Let’s be clear: this would be a monumental feat and, so far, no one has come close. And, absent any empirical evidence, folk psychology carries on. So, what kind of evidence would do it? You can’t exactly show anyone that there is no mental/soulish stuff in the world. It’s no good pointing at a brain and saying, “see! There’s no soul there!” What you would need is…
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How To Read Difficult Books
Here is a truism about studying: Sometimes we have to read things we don’t understand. This happens to me more than I would like. However, in most cases it is a problem in me rather than the book. After all, if the author understood what he wrote and what he wrote is, in principle, comprehensible (and these facts are not guaranteed), then I should be able to understand it. If you are struggling to understand something, here are 8 tips: #1 Read wide and shallow. Skim the writing. What is the topic or problem? What is the rough idea or view? Once you know these basic facts you have enough…
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How to be a Life Long Learner
One of my teachers at school used to joke about slow students. “You’re going to be here with a white beard one day” he’d say. I don’t quite have a white beard yet but I am certainly not done in the classroom. Learning, once you catch the bug, is pretty hard to stop doing. We are all life-longer learners. In fact, the longer we think of ourselves as learners, the better. I’d rather be still asking difficult questions when I finally get a white beard than think I know it all already. If you want to keep learning here are some tips: Read something you don’t understand. This sounds nuts,…