Please read my post again - I said I didn't agree with morality being supernatural in my reply to 1) of the original post. What I agree with is the essentially personal nature of morality - in how only beings with awareness of self and others as conscious agents capable of 'choice' or the...
Nice post.
Regarding 1) I agree that morality itself is not defined completely by nature. This does not mean that we can judge many natural occurences in a moral way - a volcano eruption is neither morally right or wrong. But I don't think that morality is supernatural because humans are...
Firstly, I am an atheist so people have every right to claim that my view of God below is not consistent with the Christian one.
What I find puzzling is why Christians insist on 'omnipotence, omniscience and omnibenevolent' as definition of god instead of using logic.
What I have in mind...
Following wuli and others, I would think that statement 4 is exaggerated - the total amount of information in the universe is large but not necessary infinite.
Leibniz had something quite similar in mind in his theory of monads in relation to his deterministic worldview: the central idea is...
back on the topic of beauty . . .
I found this passage in a biography of Mozart (of all places!) - it's about the relationship between beauty and death.
This is a good example of 'psychobabble' - mixing psychology and artistic commentary, using big words and convoluted sentences along the...
Spirituality is more than just admiring nature or feeling some sort of warm fuzzy feeling towards your nearest tree . . .
What's just as important is that an appreciation of the world and life has an impact on what we do and what we think we should do. This is morality derived from...
Damn, AG beat me to it :wink:
I second that view . . . (having done the same course and got the same book) It has all the classic papers - from Descartes, Locke, Hume, to Ryle, Place, Armstrong, Kripke . . . to Nagel, Searle, Fodor, Dennett, Chalmers . . .
May I also add that it's not...
As Dawkins tirelessly reminds the readers in his books many times, each of us are descended from a very long line of ancestors - each of whom had been successful in passing on his/her/its genes when many of their contemporaries had not.
So, if behaviours are influenced (if only partially) by...
So let's see:
either we have periodic emptying of the bowels of solid, or nearly constant excretion of large volumes of gases . . . sure it's less inconvenient to go the farting route, but just imagine the smell! Unlike solid waste, you can't exactly flush gases down a drainpipe. Unless...
Behaviours that promote the spread and long-term suvrival of the individual's genes - whether it be an individual's own genes or identical genes on other individuals.
Diarrhoea = excess of fluid in the bowel commonly caused by malabsorbtion of fluid from the stool or excess secretion of fluid from the epithelium
Just imagine the effect of adding 2 L or so of fluid into the GI tract a day :wink:
Of course it may be possible to coax the intestinal...
I think Kerrie said something right about spirituality being more about one's own internal experiences and morality, while religion is about conforming to the morality of others.
I have spoken to quite a few people and asked them about their own sense of morality - the 'religious' ones are...
So how about concepts like heaven, hell, resurrection of Christ . . . are these to be taken literally or symbolically? Most Christians take them literally, but is it really that obvious that such concepts are literal rather than symbolic?
I think it's a continuum - something is more alive than others. While other things are definitely NOT alive. Animals, plants etc. are definitely alive, and more alive than a virus, which in turn is more alive than a growing crystal, which in turn is more alive than a dead horse (not talking...
Perhaps, but anything that is man-made is ALSO natural. The opposite of natural is not artificial, but supernatural.
It seems to be nothing more than human arrogance to regard a house as 'artificial' and a beehive as 'natural'.
Everything is natural (unless you believe in a supernatural...