Micheal Graziano thinks that consciousness, the apparent ability of human beings to have qualitative experiences, is not mysterious, at least it can’t be explained by mysterious methods. By mysterious, he means any method of enquiry that is not a hard science: The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy, opinion, or religion. It’s a matter of hard science. It’s a matter of understanding the brain and the mind—a trillion-stranded sculpture made out of information. It’s also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, then we can build the…
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A Hermeneutical Chicken and Egg
While the truth of the scripture is guaranteed by its author, not all truths are found in scripture. I might know that Jesus is God because the Bible tells me, but I am pretty sure the Bible tells me nothing about algebra or the chemical composition of water. This is an important fact because a hermeneutic is developed partly prior to reading the Bible. A hermeneutic is a method of interpretation. We all develop a hermeneutic based on our intellectual faculties, background information, and skills. And we do so whether we are conscious of it or not. A good hermeneutic will enable us to get the right interpretation of the…
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What Makes You Think This Book is Any Different to all the Other Books?
Christians claim that the Bible is not just like any other book. It is a book that is said to be divinely inspired. God moved the human authors to write books that contain the content God intends to communicate without entirely bypassing the human author. What follows from this? Let’s say it’s true. What properties does a divinely inspired book have that other books may not have? The very least we can say is that if scripture is divinely inspired then what scripture asserts is true.[22] God cannot lie or be mistaken in any claim he makes. If the Bible is divinely inspired then everything it affirms as true is a…
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Problems of Kind and Identity: Why Gender Claims are Difficult to Ground
2015 was the year of unusual predication. What kind of thing I am mattered more than ever. Consider the following: “I am black”“I am a woman”“I am French” It was not obvious what it was that made a person any of these things. In ordinary speech we assume that some fact about the world makes a property ascription such as the above statements true about the entity we are referring to. However, the claims made by many people in 2015 were apparently fact-free claims. A man claimed to be a woman, Englishmen claimed to be Frenchmen and a white woman claimed to be a black woman. Let’s think about gender for a minute.…
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Preventative Medicine for Gamblers: The Powerball Paradox
The lottery paradox is as follows: Say I buy one Powerball ticket and there are 10 million tickets sold. Furthermore, let’s imagine that we know that one of the tickets is the winning ticket (of course, this is not be true of the Powerball since it is possible that none of the tickets is the winning ticket – that’s what gets us the rollover). The chance of my ticket being the winning ticket is one in ten million – poor odds by anyone’s estimation. It appears rational to think that one should believe a statement to be true if and only if one is sufficiently confident in the statement being…
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Can We Know What an Ancient Writer Meant?
In a recent post I argued that sentences carry single meanings and that meaning is determined by the intentions of the author. However, there is a further problem. Just because it is true that texts carry primary meanings intended by their authors, this does not entail that it is possible for a reader—especially a reader so removed chronologically, linguistically and culturally from the author—to understand the meaning of the text. In recent decades a “New Hermeneutic” has been proposed that assumes that any intended meaning is very difficult, if not impossible, to get at.[12] Given such a gulf between the author and reader, how could we possibly know what the author…
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Why Physicalism Fails
Laws of logic are necessary truths. The least debated law is the law of non-contradiction: statements that are contradictory cannot both be true in the same way at the same time. To say that it is a necessary truth is to say that there is no possibility that it could be false. Or, in possible world parlance, there is no possible world in which the law of non-contradiction is false. Physicalism is the view that there is no entity that is non-physical or that is not reducible to a physical entity. All physical states of affairs are contingent upon other physical states of affairs. It is possible, therefore, that everything…
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Sermon: 2 Peter 3
STORY: Have you ever been made to feel unsure something that you thought was obvious, but are led to doubt? I once saw a film of a classroom in which the teacher asks the children to put their had up if they think Mexico is north or south of the United States. Everyone except one kid put their hands up for north. After looking around confused, the one child puts his hand up as well. The experiment was supposed to show that peer pressure is so powerful that it will get us to give up even the most obviously true beliefs. All the children except one were told to put…