There Are No Good Reasons To Believe

If You Can Approach The World's Complexities, Both Its Glories And Its Horrors, With An Attitude Of Humble Curiosity, Acknowledging That However Deeply You Have Seen, You Have Only Scratched The Surface, You Will Find Worlds Within Worlds, Beauties You Could Not Heretofore Imagine, And Your Own Mundane Preoccupations Will Shrink To Proper Size, Not All That Important In The Greater Scheme Of Things.

The Kindly God Who Lovingly Fashioned Each And Every One Of Us And Sprinkled The Sky With Shining Stars For Our Delight - That God Is, Like Santa Claus, A Myth Of Childhood, Not Anything [that] A Sane, Undeluded Adult Could Literally Believe In. That God Must Either Be Turned Into A Symbol For Something Less Concrete Or Abandoned Altogether.

There Is No Such Thing As Philosophy-free Science, Just Science That Has Been Conducted Without Any Consideration Of Its Underlying Philosophical Assumptions.

Isn't It True That Whatever Isn't Determined By Our Genes Must Be Determined By Our Environment? What Else Is There? There's Nature And There's Nurture. Is There Also Some X, Some Further Contributor To What We Are? There's Chance. Luck. This Extra Ingredient Is Important But Doesn't Have To Come From The Quantum Bowels Of Our Atoms Or From Some Distant Star. It Is All Around Us In The Causeless Coin-flipping Of Our Noisy World, Automatically Filling In The Gaps Of Specification Left Unfixed By Our Genes, And Unfixed By Salient Causes In Our Environment.

Virtually Every Major Technological Advance In The History Of The Human Species- Back To The Invention Of Stone Tools And The Domestication Of Fire Has Been Ethically Ambiguous. If You Want To Reason About Faith, And Offer A Reasoned (and Reason Responsive) Defense Of Faith As An Extra Category Of Belief Worthy Of Special Consideration, I'm Eager To Play. I Certainly Grant The Existence Of The Phenomenon Of Faith; What I Want To See Is A Reasoned Ground For Taking Faith Seriously As A Way Of Getting To The Truth , And Not, Say, Just As A Way People Comfort Themselves And Each Other