Religion, Science and God

It was the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Protagoras ( c. 490- c. 420 BCE), numbered among the 'Sophists' by Plato, who coined the phrase 'Man is the measure of all things', taken up enthusiastically by the Renaissance humanists. Plato believed him to be denying the existence of objective truth, and this is borne out when one examines the Protagoras quotation in full: 'Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.' The Greek version of this reads: ' pant ōn chr ēmat ōn metron estin anthrōpos, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs ouk estin. '   A rather less sexist English translation would read: 'Humans are the measure of all things: of the things that exist, and of the things that don't.' This is the idea that reality is purely subjective, and that whatever appears to be the case for any given individual is true for that person. So, if the weather is cold fo...

I only mentioned this fact in passing in my last blog post, about Satan (the Adversary, in Hebrew), aka Lucifer in Latin, or Phōsphoros in Greek, both names meaning 'Light-Bringer', also being Venus, or Aphroditē, the Roman and Greek goddesses of love, and Astartē, their Phoenician equivalent, which I didn't mention. Lucifer, the Morning Star, as male, is the brother of Vesper, the Evening Star, and the son of Aurora, the Dawn, and Cephalus, meaning 'Head'. That's the Roman version of the story. The Greek version is that E ōsphoros, the 'Dawn-Bringer', Ph ōsphoros' other name, is the son of  Ē ōs, 'Dawn', and Kephalos, 'Head', an Aeolian prince she had kidnapped because she'd taken a fancy to him, forcing him to be her lover. Hesperos (Latinised as Hesperus), the Evening Star, is his brother. Astronomically, of course, the Morning and Evening Stars are identical, and neither of them are 'stars' at all, but the planet Venus...

In the Christian mythology, Satan (Hebrew, 'Adversary') is an Archangel, originally Lucifer (Latin), Phōsphoros (Greek), Helēl (Hebrew), meaning 'Light-bringer'. Because of his pride - his hubris - he and his followers, a third of all the angels in Heaven, fell, and are now condemned to suffer the torments of Hell forever. He, and they, are determined to ensure that as many humans as possible share their miserable fate, in order to spite their Creator. The Greek translation of the Old Testament, or Jewish Bible (the Tanakh ), the Septuagint (LXX), renders part of Isaiah 14:12 referring to Satan as ' ho he ōsphoros ho pr ōi ', the Morning Star, also identified with the Evening Star and the planet Venus, which to the Romans was, of course, a goddess, that of love, equated with Greek Aphrodit ē. Let us now unpack this: we are to suppose that an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator God, endowed with absolutely infallible foreknowledge, created Satan an...

I'm currently writing a paper on what's called the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. This was first proposed, as the name implies, by an Islamic theologian and philosopher,  Abû Hâmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazâlî (1055/6-1111), see: Frank Giffel (2020) . rather more recently, the argument has been defended by (among others, but most prominently) W.L. Craig and Andrew Loke . The argument may be expressed as a syllogism, thus: (1) The Universe had a beginning; (2) Everything that has a beginning has a cause; (3) Therefore, the Universe had a cause. My own version of the argument is a bit different: (1) The Universe exists; (2) The Universe had a beginning, and will have an end. (3) Everything that exists, and has a beginning and an end has a cause; (4) Therefore, the Universe has a cause. I argue that infinite temporal and causal regresses and progresses are both impossible, and that physical infinities (as opposed to conceptual or mathematical ones) are ...

Paul R Ehrlich wrote his paper, 'Has the Biological Species Concept Outlived Its Usefulness' in December 1961, publishing it in the pages of Systematic Zoology , 10(4):167-176 (DOI: 10.2307/241164). The concept was supposedly decisively refuted by Sokal and Crovello in 1970 (Sokal, R.R. & Crovello, T.J., 'The Biological Species Concept: A Critical Evaluation,' The American Naturalist , 104(936):127-153 , March-April 1970). The biological species concept (hereinafter BSC) was developed by the Russo-American geneticist, Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky (1900-75) in 1935 ('A Critique of the Species Concept in Biology,' Philosophy of Science , 2(3):344-355 , DOI: 10.1086/286379) and developed by the German biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) in (e.g.) his Systematics and Origin of Species , New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1942, and defended in Chapter 2, ' The biological species concept ', of Species Concepts and Phylogenetic Theory: A Debate , ...

Precognition is the alleged ability to foresee the future, and I shall take it to mean that. It thus implies that there is such a thing as 'the' future, and that the future is something fixed and pre-determined, just as the past has already been determined. Without prejudice to the facts, which must be decided on their own account, it must be stated that the existence of precognition would, ipso facto , be entirely fatal to any notion of 'free will', which would be ruled out by the determinism implied by the existence, if proved, of precognition. What we would be left with, in fact, is exactly the kind of 'block universe' depicted by Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski in their visualisation of the Special Theory of Relativity, with all past, present and future events in space-time pre-determined from the very first instant of time. However, this leaves no room for quantum uncertainty, let alone free will. It is clear that visualisation of possible futures , ...

As is well known, so it needs no elaboration from me here, the only guarantee that there is a reality independent of our human minds in Berkeley's idealism is God - because such a reality would exist at all times in his  mind. The fabled "tree in the quad" exists, even when no human is looking at it - even when no other sentient animal is looking at it - because God is doing so. There have been a number of attempts to remove God from the subjective idealist picture since Berkeley's time, of which a recent one is Helen Yetter-Chappell's 'Idealism Without God', Chapter 6, pp.66-81 in Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth L. Pearce, eds. (2017), Idealism. New Essays in Metaphysics , Oxford: Oxford University Press (OUP). Jonathan Head, in Chapter 3, 'Idealism in Fourfold Root', of Jonathan Head and Dennis Vanden Auweele, eds. (2016), Schopenhauer's Fourfold Root , Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England: Routledge (Taylor and Francis), argues that Schopenhauer was...