Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

No, habits do not nullify your free will. (Neither do impulsivity and fast reflexes.)

Responding to a claim that equality does not matter as long as in the absolute terms people are well-off, “Angry Bear” writes: Maybe in Cowen’s world people don’t care if they work just as hard but get less money than others but in the real world it makes people distrustful of the system and causes [...]

Can God know that He is omniscient? That is, can He be justified in holding the true belief that He is all-knowing? God, being supremely actual, knows Himself by vision; He “sees” Himself. But how does He know that His vision is completely reliable? After all, God cannot examine Himself to find out. For if [...]

Spider Webs. Our author showcases a computer program that can automatically, via simulated natural selection, adjust the parameters of a web through generations of spiders in order to improve its efficiency. The variables include the number of randomly shot flies caught and the cost of silk, both possibly subject to the law of diminishing marginal [...]

A paper I am reviewing defines regret as follows: A painful negative feeling experienced by an agent as a result of feeling responsible for some unpleasant, unfavorable, or unacceptable outcome of a situation that presented some alternative choice the agent could have selected in the past and in fact, wishes that she had selected. This [...]

I’ll begin with Aquinas: [I]t is evident that the upbringing of a human child requires not only the mother’s care for his nourishment, but much more the care of his father as guide and guardian, and under whom he progresses in goods both internal and external. Hence human nature rebels against an indeterminate union of [...]

I was asked: “Won’t people be unhappy that they could have been even happier in heaven had they lived a better life?” The technical term for this is “pain of loss,” as contrasted with “pain of sense.” The question is, will there be pain of loss in heaven? Intuitively, it seems that there shouldn’t be [...]

Aquinas writes that “whatever perfection exists in any creature, wholly pre-exists and is contained in God in an excelling manner.” (I, 14, 6) But, deliberatiely to be somewhat naive about it, if all things are more perfect in God than they are in themselves, does God really know them? And, as a related question, does [...]

Here is exactly how it happened: Elephant trunks contain no bones and do not fossilize, but we don’t need fossils to realize that the elephant trunk started out as just a nose. (Climbing Mount Improbable, 92) There you have it, folks. Surely, this account is both obvious and complete and plausible. It is obvious, because [...]

Here is Plantinga’s review. And here is Littlejohn’s commentary. First, I don’t find Plantinga’s style to be grating; quite the contrary, I think it’s delightful. I’ve addressed the compatibility of simplicity and intelligence in the previous post. So that should alleviate some of Littlejohn’s distress. I’ve also enjoyed Plantinga’s precious refutation of God’s complexity according [...]

Our author writes: Any Designer capable of construcing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent ad complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable – and therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who repostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very) neatly evaded the issue, [...]

Oh come now, dude. These do not have high specified complexity, nor are they irreducibly complex. They are not molecular machines, biochemical robots, or complex systems, like the flagellum or the blood clotting cascade; they have no moving parts; nor do they perform any function whatsoever. No matter how much they “evolve,” they still remain [...]

I am reading Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable, and on p. 6 he says, commenting on the merely apparent design of some natural rock formation, that “the human brain seems actively eager to see faces: it seeks them out.” I’ve suddenly come to appreciate Victor Reppert’s quip: “Sometimes when people talk about what the brain does [...]

Bayes’s Theorem tells us how to revise our beliefs in light of new evidence. It looks as follows: P(B|A) x P(C|A.B) P(B|A.C) = —————– P(C|A) This theorem can be used to test the probability of a hypothesis given some evidence for it. In this case we reformulate it in this way (K which stands for [...]

I have expressed an opinion that God is not limited by logic, because His knowledge is intutive and perfect and therefore God stands in no need of performing logical inferences. Thus, we from A → B, A deduce B, but God knows all three of A → B, A, and B and does not have [...]

Actual things – by vision, that is, intelligence united with an act of will that the thing exist. Possible things (and possible worlds) – by simple intelligence or intelligence without such willing. Hence the difference between the actual world and the infinity of possible worlds that could have been but were not created is only [...]

First, it will be useful to establish that God’s knowledge is intuitive not discursive. “Intuitive” means “all at the same ‘time’.” God does not reason from A to B to C, either logically or causally; He knows A, B, and C, and the relations between them all at once. “God sees all things in one [...]

There is the idea that as human power over nature grows, our need for God will be progressively lessened. Richard Feynman put it this way: God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some [...]