Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: God

  • Remarks on Religion

    By Daniel A. Kaufman ____ By now, most readers know that I am an atheist, as I do not believe in the existence of God or anything supernatural. Readers also likely know that I am Jewish by lineage and culturally and that I think God is useless both as an explanation and as a moral…

  • When Philosophy Gets Human Beings Wrong

    by Kevin Currie-Knight ____ In the past year, I’ve read two books on how people’s minds change. The latest, How Minds Change, is by science writer David McRaney. Previously, I’d read, Stop Being Reasonable, by philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Both attempt to drill into “what we know” about how real people in the real world go…

  • What the [Bleep] Can we Know? Montaigne and the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.”

    By Kevin Currie-Knight ___ [The following is a transcript of the video linked at the end.] My sense is that the world today is too full of confidence in belief. It seems like today, it is imperative not only to have a belief about everything – the right politics, the right stance toward religion, what…

  • Standards

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ Both religion and philosophy endeavor to provide us with objective standards for our moral and aesthetic and other judgments, as well as our actions. Religion does it by stipulating a supreme authority in the person of God, while philosophy does it by appeal to reason and rationality, the authority of…

  • MEANING, INTELLIGIBILITY, MORALITY, AND GOD: A CONVERSATION WITH JOSHUA RASMUSSEN, PART 2

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ The second of a two-part conversation with Joshua Rasmussen of Azusa Pacific University on a broad variety of issues, related to the meaning of life, morality, the intelligibility of the world, and God. Technical difficulties interrupted us, so the conversation is being presented in two parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8vwO9YSq-0&ab_channel=ElectricAgora 01:10 Does longevity…

  • Meaning, Intelligibility, Morality, and God: A Conversation with Joshua Rasmussen, Part 1

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ____ The first of a two-part conversation with Joshua Rasmussen of Azusa Pacific University on a broad variety of issues, related to the meaning of life, morality, the intelligibility of the world, and God. Technical difficulties interrupted us, so the conversation is being presented in two parts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-p33YkCHXA&list=PLFBaXJ7yNOYERObvjSkJfoDOgtMWVhWse&index=9&ab_channel=ElectricAgora 02:50 Meaning in…

  • Religion without Spirituality

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ [This essay first appeared on my original – now defunct – blog Apophenia. At the time, I was very involved with our local synagogue and Jewish community, and my daughter was on the cusp of her Bat-Mitzvah. While I am not involved in this way today and though I would…

  • Neither God nor Philosophy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ I was invited to contribute to an ongoing series over at Richard Marshall’s 3:16AM magazine.  The series is called “Finding Meaning” and is edited by Steven DeLay, who is a Fellow of Ambrose College, Woolf University. My contribution, “Neither God Nor Philosophy,” is the latest in the series, the entirety…

  • Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: One More Thing (Some Stuff about God and Intelligibility)

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ Of all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.    –Protagoras 1. A common mistake that people (and philosophers, especially) make is to look for intelligibility in the wrong place. This is made worse by…

  • From Passion to Belief, Part II

    by Daniel Tippens In my last essay, I argued that there are cases when having a passion alone can justify a belief. In this essay I want to apply this notion, extrapolating from this lovely poem. The Heart of Night When all the stars are sown Across the night-blue space, With the immense unknown, In…