Let me lay some cards on the table, if only to provide a bit of context for what I want to say.  I am a strong and unequivocal evolutionist who places Darwin at the very core of my philosophical mindset.  My relationship to religion, on the other had, is …. complicated.  I don’t think any of the standard categories unambiguously matches up with what I think and feel, and I’m somewhat okay with that.  I just hope that these confessions serve to clarify rather than obstruct the conversation I hope to have.  (more…)

In my last post – which fell stillborn from the wordpress – I articulated my position as a Darwinian Anti-intellectualist. Briefly – and somewhat differently – I rejected the practice of construing all beliefs as if they were automatically answers to some question or another, the premises or conclusions to some argument. The two stalking horses in this project of mine have come to be Socrates and Descartes with their respective question/answer dialectic and methodological skepticism. In this post I will roughly follow Aladair MacIntyre in framing my own de-conversion from Mormonism in terms of a (mistaken) Cartesian framework. (more…)

One of the salient contrasts in Lehi’s dream is that between those who cling to the iron rod and those who enter the great and spacious building. On the one hand, the former grope about in a blinding fog, doing their best to find their way along a path which they cannot see. The latter, on the other hand, are (somehow) able to see this path from their vantage point up in the building, but are thus unable to follow it. The question I wish to raise is this: which is more rational, to do without understanding or to understand without doing? Indeed, one can interpret the river which separates the rod from the building as the distance which is required for any kind of “objective” analysis. Obviously, Lehi thinks it better to follow the path rather than survey it from a distance. (more…)

Suppose that the office at which you and 99 other people work asks each of you to individually write down the directions from your respective houses to the office.  Suppose further that from these accounts – and only from these accounts – somebody then tries to make a detailed map.  How reliable should we expect such a map to be?  What purpose should such a map serve that the directions themselves could not?  What details should we expect to find in the written directions but not in the map (or vice versa)?  Most importantly, which would you rather have if you were simply trying to get to the office from some person’s house? (more…)

There once was an army of soldiers who considered themselves to be fighting a war which must be won at all costs.  What this war was over or who the enemy was are both questions that need not concern us here.   What matters for now is that any other objectives which these soldiers might have also valued in life paled in comparison to the primary objective of victory.  Accordingly, the goodness or desirability of these other goals or ends was essentially measured in terms of the degree to which they tended toward victory in this war rather than defeat. (more…)

A great deal of my thought surrounding the nature of (R)eligious, (S)cientific and (P)ragmatic (or pre-modern, modern and post-modern) approaches to truth is based in the premise that rule-following is the only path to truth.  Empirical observation, logical deduction and everything in between only get us anywhere inasmuch as they are normatively constrained by rules of various kinds.  In this post I would like to briefly unpack this position in terms of a familiar metaphor. (more…)

If I were to be stranded on an island with nothing but three books to keep me company there is no doubt that two of them would be Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and Godel, Escher, Bach.  When taken together, these two books provide almost the entire thrust behind this post-scientistic, neo-pragmatic mind-set in which I currently find myself. (more…)

In recent posts I have pointed to the existence of different and in some ways incompatible conceptions of truth.  As a brief reminder, I suggested that, roughly speaking, (S)cience sees truth as an accurate picture of the world as it objectively is while (R)eligion sees truth as a path which leads to some destination, i.e. God.  In this post I wish to further carve out this distinction and the implications that it has on our conception of divine foreknowledge. (more…)

(Love ya, Gary!)

It’s not terribly difficult to guess ahead of time which bloggernacle threads Gary (of NDBF fame) will comment in and roughly what his position will be therein.  This is due to a number of factors:  his overall consistency, the forthright, no-nonsense articulation of his views and (most of all) his staunch adherence to positions which tend to drive intellectuals crazy.  Gary is by no means alone in proudly flaunting these traits as a badge of honor but to me he serves as the perfect poster-boy for all Iron-Rodders if only because he is one of the most patient and likeable of the bunch.

First, I’ll give a little history regarding our interactions in the ‘nacle.  Those who have known me for a while are well aware that I take science fairly seriously and have always had a particular interest in Darwinian evolution.  I’m sure you are also well aware that Gary has always been quite unimpressed by both, to put it mildly.  After many frustrating exchanges between us in which I frequently allowed sarcasm and mockery to take the place of patience and charity I finally thought that I had figured out what Gary’s core argument really was.  (more…)

This is the post that I did not want to write.  Like the man who tells us not to think of elephants, I didn’t think there was any way that I could clearly articulate my position without producing the exact opposite of the intended response.  However, my recent post about the two competing moral theories which logically entail one another has unexpectedly given me a tool by which I might avoid the Scylla of silence without be caught in the Charybdis of contradiction.  We’ll see how this goes…

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