Blasphemy debate (update)
“this is not vengeance”, so I’ll focus on the problems associated with burying one’s head in the sand more generally, rather than picking on poor Pastor Michael.
Dennett in South Africa
I’d urge anyone who is/can be in Cape Town (31 March) or Stellenbosch (1 April) to attend these lectures by Daniel Dennett. I went to Durban last week to hear his talk on Religion as a natural phenomenon, and will certainly be attending both lectures in the Cape – he’s a wonderful speaker, and as any of you who have read his books know, also a thinker well-worth paying serious attention to.
Supernaturalism and threats to reason
Supernaturalism and religion create a climate of unreason, where we are allowed to hold unchallenged beliefs that may not prove advantageous to our survival or flourishing. It does so by allowing individuals to believe propositions that are not supported by evidence, or ones that are supported only by “evidence” provided by theoretical paradigms that are themselves supernaturalistic.
Is belief in god rational?
The question of whether belief in god is rational or not seems presume an answer to a prior, and perhaps more important question – namely: do we want belief in god to be rational, as opposed to being fruitful, joyous, beautiful, etc.? To put it another way, it’s long been of interest to me why [...]
Preliminary thoughts
Much of what I’ve been interested in over the last decade or so has revolved around epistemology, and in particular virtue epistemology – in other words, questions around what it is that we should believe, and how we should form our beliefs. These are normative questions, and raise a whole bunch of issues relating to [...]
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