Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Smith clearly does not grasp what natural theology does. He attributes to the theist the position that with the help of the proofs, “[w]hile we may not know the attributes of this being (and therefore have no clear concept of it), we do know that there is some kind of supernatural being, whatever it is. [...]

Smith believes that the existence of God cannot be rationally demonstrated. (Atheism: The Case Against God, 183) This claim we will examine in Part III of our critique. Here is it enough to stress that faith does not concern itself with problems which can be solved by reason, such as existence of God. Repeating myself [...]

The idea is that the soul is the form of the body; it is what a human being is. As such, the form, which is humanity, is the same for all people. Just as matter is the principle of individuation of the form, so bodies individualize men; the particular constitution of the body is what [...]

This is, thankfully, a fairly sophisticated book. Yet its contentions are mistaken. For starters, Smith writes: Religion has had the disastrous effect of placing vitally important concepts, such as morality, happiness, and love, in a supernatural realm inaccessible to man’s mind and knowledge. … Atheism, however, is not the destruction of morality; it is the [...]

For those who have not yet discovered the delights of Turkish pistachios, here is a public service announcement: Zenobia Nuts sells them. They are fairly expensive but worth it, trust me. (I suggest you get at least one 5-pound bag.)

I was listening to some music and felt something interesting. The first piece was The Godfather‘s famous violin “love theme.” And I felt that the real theme of that movie was that its characters were all in darkness, moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and intellectual, which they themselves willed upon themselves. They convinced themselves that there was [...]

After disputing the validity of the fine-tuning argument in a number of ways, Stenger presents us with an apparent difficulty: It is rather amusing that theists make two contradictory arguments for life requiring a creator. … In the fine-tuning argument, the universe is so congenial to life that the universe must have been created with [...]

Somebody more familiar with physics than I am should examine Stenger’s scientific claims in God: The Failed Hypothesis. Stenger believes that there may have been no singularity at the beginning of the Big Bang and that this universe may have sprung from an earlier one “by a process called quantum tunneling or so-called quantum fluctuations.” [...]

Term What It Means to a Layman What It Means to a Philosopher Utilitarian Almost precisely cubical and made of concrete, probably a multi-storey car park. One who believes that the morally right action is the one with the best consequences, so far as the distribution of happiness is concerned; a creature generally believed to [...]

The first thing to realize is that evolutionary theory (TOE) makes no quantitative predictions. So all comparisons of the strength of confirmation of the TOE with, say, quantum mechanics are completely out of place. Quantum mechanics is a highly precise branch of physics, and while the TOE does use math in things like game-theoretic models [...]

Stenger argues that there is no such thing as William Dembski’s “law of conservation of information” which states that sans intelligent intervention chance and necessity cannot generate novel specified complexity (SC). This law, according to Stenger, is equivalent to negative entropy. But since the Earth and the living beings are open systems, … . (God: [...]

Here is how our author defines the different versions of naturalism: The self-imposed convention of science that limits inquiry to objective observations of the world and generally seeks natural accounts for all phenomena is called methodological naturalism. We have also noted that methodological naturalism is often conflated with metaphysical naturalism, which assumes that reality itself [...]

On infidels.org there appeared to me this random quote: Mr. Behe has of course compared, like it or not, compared the extraordinary complexity of the human cell to the mousetrap. He said if we look at that mousetrap, it was created by a human. In fact, Mr. Miller improved on it, as you saw earlier [...]

The Lockean (and Rothbardian) theory of initial acquisition of property involves the necessity of mixing one’s labor with an object in the external environment. Once labor has been applied to a thing, it can legitimately become one’s private property. The immediate question that arises is, how much labor is necessary in order to make a [...]