The following question was asked on catholic.com: I got into a discussion about truth, and I had the opinion that there is only one Truth and that is God. So what is truth? Is it something we believe in completely, body and soul? Or is it something God reveals to us? How do we know…
Category: Philosophy
The natural-artificial and natural-supernatural dichotomies
Humans often see ourselves as being separate from nature, but we’re not. Since humans are animals, anything humans do to the environment is a natural process. Skyscrapers and beaver dams differ fundamentally in their scale, material, and function, but not in their nature. Things that are artificial are still natural. The true dichotomy, then, is…
Medium-strength atheism
Atheism is sometimes divided into weak and strong forms. Weak atheism can be described as an absence of belief in any god, while strong atheism positively affirms a belief that there is no god. This is related to the distinction between agnostic and gnostic atheism, where agnostic atheism claims no knowledge about the existence of…
Cluster definitions as an explanation for vague concepts
Vague concepts are fuzzy. They lack strict definitions and contain edge cases. One classical example is baldness: we would call a person bald even if they have three hairs on their head, so exactly how many hairs could someone have and still be bald? Another example is a heap of sand: a single grain of…
What it’s like to be a bat
Bats are a very ancient and diverse group of mammals, evolving over 50 million years ago and making up a fifth of all living mammal species (Simmons et al. 2008). They are notable for multiple distinctive adaptations, including being the only true flying mammals and using echolocation to “see” in the dark. Echolocation requires several…
But is it art?
“What counts as art” is such a perennial question in philosophy that it has been practically beaten into the ground by now. What else is there to say? The topic has been given new life by generative AI and other technological phenomena, but fundamentally the arguments are the same as they’ve ever been. My own…
Trailer Park Boys: Ricky as absurd hero
Trailer Park Boys is a long-running TV show in a mockumentary style that follows three characters, Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles, who live in a trailer park in Nova Scotia, Canada. The action follows the trio’s misadventures as they create illegal money-making schemes. Each season of the show typically begins with Ricky and Julian being released…
Circumstances beyond our control
There are two mistakes people can make about their circumstances. The first is blaming circumstances for things that are actually under their control, and the second is denying the ways in which circumstances limit what they are capable of. I have written in past blog posts about freedom and free will. I generally follow the…
Failure to understand the null hypothesis
This is an issue I see a lot in apologetics and in arguments about theism vs. atheism. Certain theists (who I will just refer to as “theists,” even though I’m not referring to all theists) want to be able to put forward the existence of god as a hypothesis that can be argued for or…
Stop viewing animals as good or bad
I recently learned that opossums can carry a parasite that can cause serious injury to horses. When looking into it, I also discovered opossums might not eat nearly as many ticks as previously thought. My heart sank reading all this. I previously viewed opossums as a kind of superhero animal, cleaning up the bad stuff…
thoughts on mind 