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Tag Archives: logic
Correlation-Causation Fallacy Watch: Packers Lost Sunday Because Casey’s Stupid Sister, Megan, Told Her to Put Sparkles on Her Nails
_____ What strikes me about this clip (apart from its humor) is Casey’s fundamentally religious intuition: the reason the Green Bay Packers lost to the New York Giants on Sunday is because the ritual guaranteeing success was not followed perfectly—with … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, critical thinking, Dionysus, drunkeness, football, God, life, logic, New York Giants, packers, reason
2 Comments
“The Fixation of Belief”: Charles Sanders Peirce’s Terrific Introduction to Critical Thinking
In 1877 the great scientist and logician, Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote a mercifully short, but not simplistic, essay for Popular Science Monthly titled, “The Fixation of Belief.” It’s a stunner. I stumbled across it in a 1964 anthology of philosophy essays, … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, atheism, Ayn Rand, charles sanders peirce, critical thinking, logic, reason, reasoning, science
2 Comments
Critical Thinking Tip #7: Try Using Aristotle’s Method of Definition to Get a Handle on What You’re Pondering
Critical thinking gets turbo-charged wherever terms are clearly defined. And it was Aristotle who first noticed that, if a definition is to be any good, it should say something general and something specific. Aristotle designated these two components the genus and diaphora … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, aristotle, atheism, critical thinking, genus, logic, philosophy, reason, species, specimen
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What is a Human, Really? Thinking about Definition via Aristotle
If your definition of a word is to be any good, Aristotle was the first to notice that it should say something general and something specific. Aristotle designated these two components the genus and species of a definition. Thus you might … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, aristotle, atheism, Ayn Rand, critical thinking, definition, gods, logic, philosophy, precision, reason
32 Comments
Richard Dawkins v. William Lane Craig: Do You Second That Emotion?
This video rather cleverly (and, I think, fairly) catches out Richard Dawkins evading the substance of William Lane Craig’s debating points, substituting them with the straw man argument that Craig is making merely emotional appeals: And here’s Smokey Robinson (which … Continue reading
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Tagged debate, emotion, God, Jesus, logic, philosophy, psychology, reason, Richard Dawkins
7 Comments
The Thirteen Missing Explanatory Links in the Atheist v. Theist Debate
Below I offer what I would call “the thirteen missing explanatory links” in the atheist v. theist debate. To my mind they constitute the most intractable problems for anyone trying to arrive at some sort of worldview coherence (whether you … Continue reading
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Tagged agnostic, apologetics, atheism, atheist, critical thinking, God, Jesus, logic, meaning, philosophy, theism
20 Comments
To boldly go where no critical thinker has gone before?
This Tech Talk podcast, posted yesterday at the New York Times, sounds interesting: In this week’s New York Times Tech Talk podcast, J.D. Biersdorfer talks to Nancy Hill of the University of Texas at El Paso about lessons from “Star Trek.” … Continue reading
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Tagged atheism, college, critical thinking, logic, philosophy, reason, science fiction, star trek
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How I Tend to Come at Issues
My habit (though I’m not always consistent about this) is to look for diamonds in the rough of ideas, even apparently bad ideas. And I find that this sometimes gets me in trouble with some readers of this blog. For example, … Continue reading
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Tagged atheism, atheists, Ayn Rand, liberalism, logic, philosophy, psychology, reason, rhetoric
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Blogging UFOs: The UFO Hypothesis (and Tom Cruise) on Trial
These past few weeks, as I’ve thought about UFOs as a phenomenon, I’ve found myself confused, going back and forth between the value of testimony v. the value of expert scientific opinion, and then it occurred to me: Juries frequently encounter the exact same dilemma. In … Continue reading
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Tagged agnostic, atheist, ETs, law, logic, Out of the Blue, reason, science, skepticism, tom cruise, ufo, UFOs
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OXYMORON Watch: Can a Mystic ALSO BE an AGNOSTIC?
Do you suppose it’s possible to be an agnostic and a mystic at the same time? I don’t necessarily have an answer for this question, I’m just asking. If a person says that reality is not contained by strictly scientific … Continue reading
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Tagged agnosticism, apologetics, atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, logic, philosophy, reason, religion, science, skepticism
1 Comment
