Stephen Law tackles Plantinga

-
Tristan authored a rebuttal of Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism over at Advocatus Atheist not too long ago, and now Stephen Law, who actually does this stuff professionally, has a paper up in the Oxford Journals called Naturalism, Evolution and True Belief that takes Plantinga on in even more detail. It's a beefy read, and personally I always find the heavy use of acronyms a bit confusing, but it's a good read if you're in to that sort of heavy philosophy.

Is Stephan Law's rebuttal successful? That's for you to decide.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Christianity is bullshit, part 1: The Bible is stupid

-
Imagine that you were the perfect, omnipotent, all-knowing Lord and Creator of the universe. You decided that you were going to give one -- just one -- book to humanity. It would be their moral compass, an insight into their nature and into yours, and act as a guide for how they could live rightly and walk a path that would lead their souls into an eternity with you.

Obviously, the first thing you'd want to put in there are some totally unscientific, archaic behavioral codes for menstruating women, and for pregnant women after they give birth. You'd want to be sure to help them regulate slavery, and specify how badly they were allowed to beat their slaves. And of course you'd want the book to be chock full of mythology -- a creation myth, a flood myth, a fictional exodus, and hagiographical stories about how your loyal armies killed the shit out of everyone who dared to worship the wrong gods.

There's a point here about the Bible that, in my estimation, really cannot b…
Read more...

The (pseudo) science of the film "Sunshine"

-
Image
Recently I've been bemoaning the fact that sci-fi horror is one of the most woefully underexploited genres in Hollywood. We can easily count the classics in the genre on one hand — Alien/s, The Thing, The Fly, maybe even 2001 if you think HAL9000 is a scary sonofabitch. There are lots of mediocre to good-but-not-great sci-fi horror flicks — Pitch Black, Pandorum, Mimic, Event Horizon...

The only big-budget film in the genre I can think of is the highly divisive Prometheus (personally, I concur with Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper). I suppose Gravity, which was obviously amazing, could fit in there too — although it seems to fall more under pure 'suspense' than horror. There have been some lower budget sci-fi horror flicks, like the pretty-decent Europa Report and the rather middling Last Days on Mars, but really I have a hard time thinking of outstanding, classic entries in the genre.

In any case, I decided to add Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyl, to the list. I'd hear…
Read more...

Divorce

-
Image
Tonight I was lying in bed with my wife and our three dogs. As we lay there laughing and loving on them, I said, "I never thought my life would be this good." But as I was laughing, I was crying, too. Tomorrow my wife and I will meet with a family law attorney to begin mediation. After four years of marriage, we're getting a divorce.

It's hard to know exactly where things went wrong. Eight months ago, after a rather unfortunate and stressful night when one of our dogs got very sick, she said to me, "I want to break up." I was in shock. Neither of us had never said a word about splitting up. We had been going to a couple's counselor for a couple of weeks, after my wife told me we needed to improve our communication. Our counselor thought we were a pretty easy case. Suffice to say that in the next session, things became much more complicated.

After a few months of counseling, she filed for divorce. She did so in secret. The night she told me, I had asked …
Read more...