Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Religion

  • Is Islam a Religion?

    An article by Howard Kainz

  • How Much Time Should be Spent on Philosophy?

    Our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohanka writes, You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?…

  • Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

    Ruffin Crozat writes, There is much depth in your short post on religion and reason from 6 May. Here are two points I often ponder about this topic: First, I appreciate the difficulty of solving philosophical problems, but I wonder about the claim that they are insoluble (I suppose “insoluble” means “insoluble by humans alone”).…

  • The Most Powerful Argument Against Religious Faith Ever?

    Over at the The Philosopher's Stone, Robert Paul Wolff waxes enthusiastic over a quotation from Hobbes: "Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION." Just think what Hobbes accomplishes in these eighteen words!  The only distinction between religion and superstition is whether the tales that provoke…

  • Sudduth on Survival

    Jime Sayaka interviews philosopher of religion Michael Sudduth on the topic of postmortem survival.  (HT: Dave Lull)  Excerpt: My central thesis is that traditional empirical arguments for survival based on the data of psychical research—what I call classical empirical arguments—do not succeed in showing that personal survival is more probable than not, much less that…

  • The Religious Side of Camus

    Albert Camus, one of the luminaries of French existentialism, died on this day in 1960, in a car crash.  He was 46.  Had he lived, he might have become a Christian. Or so it seems from Howard Mumma, Conversations with  Camus. This second-hand report is worth considering, although it must  be consumed cum grano salis. See…

  • Christian Science Monitor Religion Quiz

    Here.  I answered 32 out of 32 questions correctly.  If you are feeling a little too merry this season and want to bring yourself down a bit, administer it to your students and see what happens.

  • Arguments, Testicles, and Inside Knowledge

    T. L. e-mails, Here’s fodder for a follow-up MP post, if you care to pursue it. I do not endorse the following objection, but I wonder how you’d reply. In “David Lewis on Religion” you say: "To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by…

  • David Lewis on Religion

    Jim Slagle points me this morning to a post of his that links to four papers by David Lewis on religion from Andrew Bailey's Lewis page.  (Occasional MavPhil commenter Bailey deserves high praise for making available online papers by van Inwagen and Lewis.)  Slagle goes on to make some criticisms of Lewis with which I…

  • Theism is not a Religion

    Yesterday I argued that atheism is not a religion.  Well, theism is not a religion either, but for different reasons.  Atheism is not a religion because it amounts to the rejection of the central commitment of anything that could legitimately be called a religion.  (So if atheism were a religion, it would amount to a…

  • In Fairness to Dworkin

    In an earlier post I commented with some trenchancy on Ronald Dworkin's views about religion in Religion Without God as these views were represented by Peter Berkowitz in a recent article.  Although I was careful to point out that my remarks presupposed the accuracy of Berkowitz's representation, I was a bit uneasy about my comments,…

  • Nine Impediments to Religious Belief

    Why is religious belief so hard to accept?  Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter and lie in the path of the would-be believer.  Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question,  a normative question.  The following taxonomy is merely descriptive.  And not in order of stopping power.  And…

  • Progressivism as Religion: Peter Berkowitz on Ronald Dworkin

    Here.  Excerpt: For Dworkin, the meaning of religion consists in “two central judgments about value” that he believes religious people — theists and some atheists — regard as objectively true. First, “each person has an innate and inescapable responsibility to try to make his life a successful one: that means living well, accepting ethical responsibilities…

  • Stephen “God is not One” Prothero to Speak at Arizona State University

    Details here.  What follows is an excerpt from a 2010 post: Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques Simplifying a four-part  schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper, 2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a solution…

  • Outside Help

    The religious realize not only that they need outside help to live aright, but also that they need outside help to achieve this realization.