The next chapter that Harris offers is a wee one, asking whether or not the truth he is offering might be bad for us. He doesn’t think so, and offers his own testimony — how “losing the sense of free will has only improved [his] ethics” (p. 45). There he goes again, writing as though …
The Next to Last Rock in the Avalanche
I don’t think I should be too severe in these reviews of Sam Harris’ most recent book. When one of the country’s leading atheists, the author of The End of Faith, trumpets the end of atheism, this is actually something that Christians should welcome and celebrate. Right? The fact that he doesn’t (as of yet) …
An Infinite Plane of Green Velvet
The next chapter was a brief one, and so I will try to be brief as well. The upshot is that Harris shows (and I think he does show) that quantum indeterminate events in the brain cannot be a foundation for free will. If everything is determined, then the cosmos is a locomotive on the …
A Glimpse Into a Musical Event
Logos Benefit Concert | David Erb from Dane Wilson on Vimeo.
Way Up in the Middle of the Air
In his next chapter, Harris outlines the three philosophical schools of thought on the matter of free will. They are, respectively, the determinist, the libertarian, and the compatibilist schools of thought. The determinist says that we have no free will, deal with it. The libertarian says that we do too have free will, and that …
Flipping Coins in the Control Room
There are two levels at least to the debates over the freedom of the will. The first has to do with the intersection of time and eternity, and is a problem that theists have to deal with. Arminians believe that God knows the future exhaustively, and Calvinists believe that He knows this future exhaustively because …
Sam Harris, Moist Robot
So then, Sam Harris has a new little book out, and for such a small book (66 pages), it promises to be a lot of fun. I say this because the book appears to be filled with epistemological obliviousness, cover to cover. The name of the book is Free Will, released by Free Press (heh) …
Puritanical
“We need to guard our lives against the love of riches and worldly cares. All love for earthly goods, however, is not a sin. Their sweetness is a drop of his love and they have his goodness imprinted on them. They kindle our love for him as love tokens from our dearest friend. Loving them …
A Little Rooster of a Brother
In most instances, bringing up daughters also includes bringing up sons at more or less the same time, and this means that someone has to manage the interaction. Boys and girls discover their differences early on, and in many cases, they discover that they don’t like those differences all that much. And they say so. …
Book of the Month/March 2012
The World-Tilting GospelDan PhillipsKregel Publications, 2011 I want to start a new feature on this blog, if I can keep up the pace. I have occasionally done extended reviews of books, blogging through them, but I think I would like to start reviewing a book a month in more of a one-off, hit-and-run fashion. But …