Why is there something rather than nothing?
New Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking are confident in their atheism; even if they still have a few issues to tackle. Philosophers continue to ask them why consciousness and morality exist. Why do concepts of good and bad, wrong and right persist? Are such things outdated; should they be discarded? Once one…
Continue readingThe Unselfish Gene
Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene in 1976. It represented some of his greatest writing and was much less antagonistic toward other philosophical and theological perspectives than his later writings. The book described a gene-centred view of evolution and was not a treatise on whether or not organisms are selfish. Yet, a persistent problem in…
Continue readingInformation and Meaning
We have all seen this situation numerous times. We are sitting among friends talking about some subject when someone asks a question to which no one has the answer. Soon, someone pulls out their phone and googles the question (yes, I did just use the verb form of Google; language is always changing). A few…
Continue readingVirtue
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky sets up two antagonistic theories of the way in which mankind seeks virtue and social order. The first is related by Pyotr Alexandrovich Miusov (a wealthy landowner) as he explains that Ivan Karamazov gave an address in which he stated that there exists no law of nature that man…
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