The Debt to the Wise and the Foolish

Steve McRae released a video on the problem of divine hiddenness, here's his video , and this is my response to it:  That God can be known It's the Catholic view that God can be known with certainty from reason; though not without difficulty.  Hence the many arguments for God's existence, and many defenses of those arguments given by professional philosophers. The texts defending these arguments can be quite dense, but it is clear that there are certain classical pathways of resaoning for God's existence; objections have arisen, but these often seem only to be the occasion of newer and greater clarifications of old arguments, and so seem only to show ever more clearly how reason can bring us to God.  Likewise, we Catholics hold that God can be known through miracles and fulfilled prophecies.  Thus I'd argue that God does continue to perform such things even up to this day, and this in very big and grandiose ways. Reports of miracles have not declined; we still have ...

Replicability can't be the ultimate criterion of knowledge for the simple reason that if it were, you couldn't know anything. For in order to replicate a certain type of event, you need to be able to know know that token instances of events of that type have occurred in the past; so that each time you replicate the event type, you can say that the new token is in fact of the same type as said past events.  The issue is that each token event qua token event is per se irreplicable, for by nature the boundaries of the identity of events boundaries are found in time, so that an event can be marked by it's beginning and end, so that any subsequent event will by definition be a distinct event (not the same event) and so each subsequent event will failed to replicate that exact same event, but will only at best have certain similarities to said event, so that it can be classified as the same 'type' of event; so that it will remain that the tokens qua token events are never...

 Big Think wrote an article on how the universe really is 100% reductionist in nature , this is my response to it.   The article as a whole has 6 sections, namely:  The Introduction   Section 1: "The Fundamental"  Section 2: "How A Reductionist Sees The Universe"  Section 3: "How 'Apparent Emergence' Is Readily Explained By Reductionism"  Section 4: "The 'God-of-the-Gaps' Nature of Non-Reductionism"  "Final Thoughts"  I will address each of them in turn.  The introduction The article is arguing for reductionism, which it defines in this manner:  " the fundamental laws that govern the smallest constituents of matter and energy, when applied to the Universe over long enough cosmic timescales, can explain everything that will ever emerge.  [...]   This simple idea — that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena — is known as reductionism . " (ellipses mine)  The article provides a general...

This was a post I made on Facebook, but figured it would be valuable to share here:  The transcendental argument for neutrality 'TAN'   So I worked up this argument in response to Daniel Akande's most recent video , so I figured i'd post it here to see how other people think of it; I think from this one can develop a kind of 'neutrality presuppositionalism' from it, but I'm still working that out; but here's the argument: If it is possible to argue without question begging, then neutrality is possible.  It is possible to argue without question begging Neutrality is possible Or conversely:  If neutrality is not possible, it is not possible to argue without question begging.  It is possible to argue without question begging Neutrality is possible.  The value of this view is that it attacks a view shared by presuppositionalist views of all sort (not just calvinism, but variations of this as applied to other religions), namely, it attacks the idea of the so ...