“Everyone wants to pretend that he can postulate a magic balcony upon which a finite creature can stand, and from which vantage that finite creature can survey everything in the cosmos that has any epistemological bearing or significance at all. Part of the deal is that everyone agrees not to ask too many questions about …
Scary
Proving the Proofs
“Finite creatures always have to begin from somewhere. Finite creatures have to start. God has created us in such a way as to be able to reason axiomatically, and for that to be the only way we could be able to reason. These axioms can be of pure reason (parallel lines don’t cross each other), …
Epistemic Weird
“Epistemology is like taking your eyeballs out to look at them. If your optic nerve were elastic, and you could pull your eyeballs out and point them at each other, what exactly would you see?” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 80)
Boycotts, Both Theirs and Ours
Introduction: So as we are being treated to the spectacle of the South rising again, challenging the authority of the Feds again, and this time doing it when they have the manifest moral high ground, it is time to examine some of the secular freak-out reaction to it, not to mention some of our reactions …
Epistemic Turtles
“We want to start at the very beginning and we think that the very beginning is ‘How can we know anything at all?’ And, once we have answered the question of how we know, we ask how we can possibly know that. And as it turns out, it really is turtles all the way down” …
More Mailbaggery
Bible Reading Challenge: A regular reader here. Just wanted to write to say I’ll be taking part in the Bible Reading Challenge this summer. You write that “Tens of thousands of people are already involved in this movement. If it were hundreds of thousands, we would begin to see changes.” Perhaps (just perhaps) there are …
Faith Sits
“When a man sits down in a chair, he certainly has faith in the chair. But it is the chair that holds him, not his faith. The faith does not provide an iota of additional strength to the chair. But the faith still sits” (Mere Fundamentalism, p. 76).
What is Education For?
To ask the question “what is education for?” is actually to ask a very different question. The purpose of education is nested within a larger set of questions, and ultimately it all works out to the great question “what are people for?” And upon reflection, this makes sense. Education is part of the process of …
Our Diseased Republic
Introduction: I have resolved to overcome this unbecoming reticence of mine. The monkeyshines that characterize so much of our public discourse in the Age of Trump have finally gotten to me. They have overwhelmed my reserved and retiring approach to modern politics. I am going to say what I think. But This is Not About …