Tag: logic
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The God of This World
Isn’t it obvious that God, or at least our idea of God, needs saving as much as we do? He—forgive me if necessary for saying “He”—has been run through the mud by terrorists, televangelists, New Atheists, and grandmothers’ guilt. The rest of us are supposed to have a relationship with this guy? Or even just…
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The Proof Industry
Today at The Guardian, a bit of a glimpse into my ongoing obsessions about proofs for the existence of God. Just last night, sifting through a novella I wrote as a freshman in college, I discovered a whole forgotten chapter about the proofs—for some reason, they have been following me so doggedly all these years.…
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All in Moderation?
I could be frantically live-blogging from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting in Chicago. I won’t, per se. But in a number of places here I have been hearing lots of talk about religious “extremists” and “moderates.” It goes without saying that nearly all of the thousands of AAR attendees—mostly academics in religious studies…
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A Fascinating Letter
I’d like to share a wonderful thing someone sent me recently, in regard to my article, “What Happens to Religion When It Is Biologized,” in Search magazine: Hello Nathan: One piece of information which I did not notice in the discussion was the fact that this multi-verse is a virtual reality which is being displayed…
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Still Not Dead Yet, for Now, at Least
The last couple of days I’ve been working on a response to “God Is Not Dead Yet,” the current cover article of Christianity Today. Since I’m working on a project about proofs for the existence of God, I couldn’t help but want to tackle this meaty piece by the prominent evangelical apologist William Lane Craig.…
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Different Sorts of Skepticism
Among Victorians, apparently, it was a kind of minor sport to Name That Hellenic Philosophical Movement. Your friend Charles the glutton would of course be the epicurean, pious William the stoic, and your father, deep down, a cynic. And so on. Since, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, all philosophy is really just footnotes on…
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Becoming a Person
The New York Times week in review, blessedly (and quoting the fabulous journal The New Atlantis), quotes William James on attention this week. The point, naturally, is yet another condemnation of our relentlessly multitasking, over-busy mental society. But there is so much more in this pregnant piece: To James, steady attention was thus the default…
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The Theory of Double Truth
Have you ever had the desire, the urge, the dangerous little need to contradict yourself for its own sake? Or for the sake of something quite unspeakable? The words “paradox” and “contradiction” come eerily close to being synonyms—they mean the same encounter of irreconcilables—yet they connote different moods. A contradiction is the dumbest, most obvious…