Comprehensibility of the universe

Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge brings three authors together, Tom Holland, Stephen Meyer and Douglas Murray: A key consideration: vs, this notorious poetic assertion: Of course, both of these reflect the rise of the skeptical mindset among the educated elites, the modern inferior good that stands in for the cardinal virtue, prudence. So, we cannot escape the epistemic challenge, what it means to know and to what confidence, especially as regards roots of reality and our place in reality. (Where, trivially, for any reasonably definable field, X, the claim that one knows on some warrant that there is no objective, knowable truth regarding X, is instantly self-referentially incoherent and self defeating. As this hyperskeptical claim is about X and claims objective Read More ›

The stage is in darkness, with sombre mood music, then light rises . . . Origenes, 226 in the Pregnancy thread: <<Two desperate naturalists in a room. A: “I feel completely desperate. There is no way we will ever be able to explain life and consciousness.”B: “I feel the exact same way. The main issue is that we have nothing to work with. All we have is mindless particles in the void obeying mindless regularities. Starting from that, how can we possibly explain life, not to mention personhood, freedom, and rationality? There is simply no way forward.”A: “Exactly right. Sometimes I feel like such a loser. The other day I heard that current science cannot even explain liquidity.”B: “What did Read More ›

One of the many fundamental errors of nominalism is to confuse labels with logic of being substance. To clarify the matter, let us ponder: As was noted in the ongoing defending thread: KF, 839: As a start point for rethinking, please, show us a nine sided hexagon. (What, you can’t, isn’t the term hexagon just a word we can apply as we please, rewriting the dictionary at will, there is no such thing as a nature so there is no difference. So, on such radical nominalism, there is no difference between truth and error, truthfulness and willful deceit, justice and injustice, male and female, knowledge and myth, indoctrination and education, acquitting the innocent and knowingly condemning such, sound policing and Read More ›