What Catacomb Resident is explaining here is similar to Alvin Plantinga’s sensus divinatus, the faculty that senses and processes ideas about metaphysical things as a form of a priori knowledge, just as philosophically legitimate as the physical senses or logic. Our sensus divinatus is damaged by default because of the Fall, since we are tied … Catacomb Resident: Futile Philosophy 2
A part of one of Ed’s recent blog posts, and then one of his comments: Don’t be a sucker for the philosophical arguments to support any part of this conflict. Obey what your convictions demand within the context; don’t listen to any other voice. Christ is a Person, not a body of ideas. He lives … God and Ontology
Investigation finds doping cover-ups in weightlifting If you found some doping and cover-ups going on, that means there’s a ton of it that is still being covered up. It’s probably everywhere at the professional level, but it’s only investigate if someone with a lot of money makes someone else with a lot of money angry. … Links of Possible Relevance, Part 35
1. Per Plantinga, and some forms of natural selection, ceteris paribus, life selects for organisms that adapt towards survival cues, not for truth. Plantinga frames this as an argument against evolutionary naturalism. This is not false, but could be true in other cases than have nothing to do with theism. 2. The survival vs truth … Human Minds Prefer Survival More Than Truth
I was going to do an original post on this but Wintery Knight did it sooner and better. Quoting J.W. Wartick: The depiction of the multiverse with little-to-no qualification was alarming, for there is much debate over whether there even is such a multiverse, and if there is, to what extent it may be called … Utterly Shocking: First Episode of Cosmos Reboot Contains Unscientific Propositions
This was a neat exercise, mapping my employment history and assigning levels of happiness to them. I used the word “nurp” as a unit of happiness, a play off of Alvin Plantinga’s “turp” as a theoretical unit of evil. THe ratings I gave each position were based on pay (duh), the actual work itself and … Personal Employment History and Happiness
Alvin Plantinga argued for the evolutionary argument against naturalism (PDF link): if modern humans macroly evolved over a large period of time, our cognitive processes are tailored more towards seeking survival rather than truth. If evolutionary theory were true, that would mean that modern forms of government came extremely late in the game. It could … Evolutionary Argument Against The State?
I’ve mentioned a few times on here, and in a roundabout way in the review of Alvin Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief, about non-Aristotelian epistemology. This is sometimes called Middle Eastern (ME) or Hebraic epistemology. ME epistemology utilizes divine revelation as a legitimate, basic form of knowledge, the same way we accept sense perception or memory … A Quick Thought on Non-Aristotelian Epistemology
Whenever you want to get a lot of response from religious people, ask something basic yet broadly-defined and colored by perspective. At the Christian Libertarians group on facebook, someone asked what faith was. The responses were varied as you’d expect with such a word with varied usage. I was surprised there wasn’t the guy that … A Very Clear Post About the Definition of Religious Faith
I will get to the falling anvils later. But first, here’s the problem of evil set in deductive logic form. My church’s small group dealt with this idea a few weeks ago, and I think it’s the best argument against the Christian God there is. God is omnibenevolent. God is omnipotent. God is omniscient. Evil … The Problem of Anvils
After reading Why I Am Not A Christian I wanted to balance it out with the other side, though the intent of the books are very different. I had read Warranted a few years ago, but a second pass through helped me retain a whole lot more of Platinga’s idea. As barely an amateur philosopher … Book Review: Warranted Christian Belief
A few years ago I started the official site for Alvin Plantinga, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. I had contacted him about doing a site after reading Warranted Christian Belief (read it all for free here). There were papers and other things floating around the web that weren’t really consolidated into one … Planting(a) Seeds