Category Archives: god

Supernatural Explanations

Posted on 2013-04-01 by TJ

Before talking about supernatural explanations, it’s a good idea to say something about explanations in general. An explanation is a causal account of a particular situation based on general principles, laws or abstractions. Causal accounts are general, explanatory accounts are … Continue reading →

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Why Isn’t the Germ Theory of Disease Mentioned in Scripture?

Posted on 2013-02-24 by TJ

My text for the day will be the Gospel According to Lister, in which he recounts the revelation God gave to His beloved prophet, Pasteur: And in those days there was a great sickness in the land, and the people … Continue reading →

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The Mess That’s Texas

Posted on 2012-07-14 by TJ

The Republican Party of Texas (RPT) has released a platform that is so over-the-top stupid and self-contradictory it reads like a parody of itself. The brain trust of the RPT begins by affirming that governments in the US ought to … Continue reading →

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Some Notes on the Higgs

Posted on 2012-07-04 by TJ

It looks very likely that the Higgs boson has been observed at CERN. There’s a lot of careful, discriminating, detailed and precise analysis to be done yet, but the data so far are consistent with a Standard Model Higgs, which … Continue reading →

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Not the End of the World

Posted on 2011-10-22 by TJ

It is October 22nd and the world is still here. It has not been consumed by fire. Unbelievers have not been swept away by a vast panoply of material calamities. The elect have not been taken off to heaven. Harold … Continue reading →

Posted in epistemology, god, prediction, psychology, religion, science | 2 Comments

Some Notes on Tautologies

Posted on 2011-09-14 by TJ

Philosophers routinely and uncritically proclaim that tautologies are ontologically vacuous. Since I’ve claimed to be a bit of a Kantian, and the analytic-synthetic dichotomy is a classical Kantian mistake, it seems worth taking a bit of time to explain what’s … Continue reading →

Posted in epistemology, god, mechanics, physics, probability, quantum, religion, science | 2 Comments

Some Notes on Causality

Posted on 2011-09-13 by TJ

Causality, like pornography, is one of those things that people have trouble defining, although they have a deeply ingrained feeling that they’ll know it when they see it. Aristotle talked about four types of causality: formal, material, efficient and final. … Continue reading →

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The Nature of Existence

Posted on 2011-09-12 by TJ

The Greeks had a word for it, although I’m not entirely sure what it was. The name “metaphysics” is taken from the book that was bound “after Physics” in some early collection of Aristotle’s work. At least that’s the story. … Continue reading →

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The Nature of Time

Posted on 2011-09-11 by TJ

We live in a four-dimensional world in which the three spacial dimensions and time stand in a particular geometric relation to each other. This is not news. We’ve known this for over a century, and the people who made the … Continue reading →

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Some Notes on Memory

Posted on 2011-09-10 by TJ

One of the many big lessons of science in the past three hundred years is what odd and unreliable organs our brains are. I know mine is. I forget things. People’s names, where I put my glasses, the fact that … Continue reading →

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