REASON42

Here’s an interesting video with Christopher Hitchens discussing his book ‘God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’.  It’s about an hour and 10 mins long with the first 25 mins being a defence of the subtitle.  Following this there’s an interesting Q&A session.  Well worth checking it out.

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Not read it myself but after seeing this video I’ve placed my order.  Get it from Amazon UK here, or Amazon US here.

From a religious perspective there are two types: Natural Evil and Moral Evil.  Natural Evil will be that of earthquakes and tsunamis etc.  Moral Evil is of the sort when acting immorally, such as when someone murders another, or acts in an immoral way against a ‘righteous’ viewpoint etc. But the use of the word ‘Evil’ is always from a subjective position.  One man’s Evil is another man’s Good.  Also, the word ‘Evil’ has superstitious connotations and the followers of most religions will say that Evil is a force working against ‘good’. 

Within the philosophy of religion there is indeed the ‘Problem of Evil’, especially for the monotheistic traditions.  Apologetics will use the defence that Evil occurs to bring about a greater ‘good’ because otherwise it would be against the nature of a supposed omnipotent and benevolent God. Continue Reading »

Is mathematics purely a human creation, or does it exist independent of us and we have ‘discovered’ it?

From what I’ve briefly read on Russell, Frege and the history of mathematics is that it seems there is no solid ground that mathematics can depend upon without us (humanity) having accepted a long series of axioms that may or may not be consistent. In other words, we can never be certain that (or at least as far as we know today) what we take to be self evidently true, is actually true. Further, it seems apparent that the principle of logic is a process of linguistic analysis rather than mode of arriving at certainty.

This is an area of philosophy I’ve never really considered before. In fact, I assumed that mathematics was independent of human thought. Now, I don’t think it is and there’s a majority of philosophers who have already came to the same conclusion. This needs further investigation, methinks!

Adam