Dennett’s Thesis isn’t Evidence for Very Interesting Claims

November 7, 2012 By 44 Comments
religious evolution

This post is part of a series discussing Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell. The main thrust of Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell is that the history of religion is not incompatible with evolutionary theory.  That sounds a lot less exciting than an attack on religion, but it's what the book is actually about.  Dennett's book doesn't mount up any direct evidence against the truth claims of religion, but it does make the argument that religion is something you might be reasonably … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Atheism, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: 44 Comments

Bob, can I interest you in Transhumanism?

October 24, 2012 By 99 Comments

Bob Seidensticker has looked over my recent post on objective morality and hard to get at truths, and he's got some more questions.  Let me pull out a couple quotes from Bob's post: I'll agree that there’s nothing absolute for the consensus to be truth about. When we say, “Capital punishment is wrong,” there is no absolute truth (the yardstick) for us to compare our claim against. Is capital punishment wrong? We can wrestle with this issue the only way we ever have, by studying the issue … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: , , 99 Comments

Have Humans ‘Won’ Evolution?

May 7, 2012 By 16 Comments

In the comments of my last post on evolution and the source of moral law, I had a bit of a back and forth with Matt about whether evolution favors altruism.  I want to single out his comments for two reasons.  First, I thought he displayed admirable humility in admitting he didn't have the evidence to back up his intuition.  A lack of data didn't mean he had to give up his opinion (after all, scientists usually aren't agnostic about what experimental results they expect) and he did a nice job … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy Tagged With: , , , 16 Comments