Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

David Eller opines: “To non-Christians (including Atheists), the Bible is not authority at all, just as to Christians the Qu’ran or the Hindu Vedas are no authority. Nonbelievers don’t care what somebody else’s text says. … I don’t care what the Bible says — it is not my authority — and so its claims are [...]

From Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution blog.

The shifting of the “burden of proof” of God’s existence entirely onto the theist is an unwise move on the part of the atheist. For the theist will welcome this development, because in so doing the atheist essentially refuses to use some of the most powerful arguments against the existence of God, such as the [...]

There are some people, Christians mostly, who call atheism a “religion.” David Eller takes them to task for this: “If Theists think religion is good, then that is high praise; in fact, we should then qualify for federal funds and tax exemptions, too. If we are a religion in any sense, we are entitled to [...]

In 2001 Lew Rockwell penned an article, in which he mentioned the cost per student in public vs. private schools. At that time, according to his research, it was $6,000 vs. $3,100 with many public schools being in awful conditions, so it makes sense to speculate that the higher prices did not buy better quality. [...]

Jude Wanniski, may he rest in peace, when he was alive, spent his time sending “memos” to politicians and federal bureaucrats advising them on a variety of policies. His most famous supplication was that the policy-makers use the Laffer curve to determine the “optimal” tax rates, optimal meaning that which would bring in the most [...]

As I argued below, private property anarchists need to demonstrate that private solutions will work for each branch of government to be privatized. The interesting thing is that each branch presents its own unique challenges. Let’s start with law-making. I have defended the view that morality is intersubjective; it works only when there is agreement [...]

The IEP sets out the objection: Proponents of this objection point out that, according to Molinism, the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom must be prior to God’s creating activity because they inform His creative decision. However, under the standard possible worlds analysis, which counterfactuals are true is dependent upon which world is actual (counterfactuals [...]

I’d like to suggest that free-will libertarianism considers the agent, the self making the choices to be an irreducible ultimate given. On the other hand, it seems compatible with libertarianism to hold that the choice is still determined in the sense that if agent P were put in circumstances C, where C is a set [...]

The city, Hoppe says, is a creation of merchants. It is a trading center, a marketplace. As such, it entails a mixing of people of different races, ethnicities, tribes, etc. who would otherwise have stayed with their own kind. In big cities “the most elaborate and highly developed system of physical and functional integration and [...]

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, agrees with the view that “economics (real economics, not the nonsense you get on talk shows and business hours) is very, very difficult and involves a great deal of complex math.” That’s emphatically not true. Economic theory is a logical a priori science. Moreover, it is accessible to everyone, [...]

“Well, let’s just hope we’re lucky.” But it’s interesting that Friedman writes that “One of the first things I realized when visiting Iraq after the U.S. invasion was that the very fact that Iraqis did not liberate themselves, but had to be liberated by Americans, was a source of humiliation to them.” Ah, indeed. The [...]

William Kristol objects to the now famous MoveOn.org ad featuring a mother and her 1-year old son: Now he argues that “Unless we enter a world without enemies and without war, we will need young men and women willing to risk their lives for our nation. And we’re not entering any such world.” Thanks to [...]

Only the government can gobble up productive land and make it useless. Florida will “buy the nation’s largest producer of cane sugar” to “restore” the Everglades. … “Environmental groups hailed the undertaking. ‘This is putting it back the way it was in 1890,’ said David Guest, a lawyer with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. ‘When you [...]

Natural rights are those human rights respecting which promotes social cooperation, general welfare, and human flourishing and happiness; and results in the fastest improvement in the standard of living of the immense majority of the population. In other words, natural rights emerge from the body of natural law as elucidated by natural and social sciences, [...]

In my review of one of the previous papers in this book I blithely equated moderation with temperance. Byron will have none of that: these are different habits, and the “virtue” of moderation is even aptly placed in scare quotes. Here is what our author says: “…moderate folks are contented satisficers. … Considered as a [...]

In one episode Peter is filming a plastic bag being moved to and fro by the wind and saying that there’s so much beauty in the world, obviously in a reference to the movie American Beauty. Then there is a shot of God on a cloud yelling at him: “It’s just a piece of trash [...]

In the previous post we compared the satisficing/maximizing pair to duty/supererogation. Our present author likens it rather to rightness/thresholds. His first claim is that consequentialism and satisficing are totally incompatible. This is because a consequentialist can always ask the satisficer why he has not opted for a more pleasant choice, all things considered. “If the [...]

If we think of the relationship of maximizing to satisficing as of supererogation to duty, then is there a difference between ethical and rational satisficing? Dreier says there is. Ethical satisficing can be understood as declining to do the supererogatory act. This our author justifies by saying that while moral reasons may require one always [...]

There are, according to Weber, at least two “perspectives” on life: that of the moment and that of the life as a whole. Each entails different values. What is valued from the momentary point of view may prove almost irrelevant when viewed from a “bird’s-eye perspective.” For example, getting stung by a bee is painful [...]