Philosophy

Wes Widner on August 30th, 2011

A bible-study companion of mine recently sent me Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism”. Here’s my response: Thanks for sending that over! I must admit I haven’t read much of Sartre, so the lecture you sent helped remedy that. I have a hard time differentiating existentialism from hedonism, something Sartre seems to acknowledge at least by accident when he talks [...]

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Here is an excellent example of the McGurk effect: My interpretation of this effect is based on the physics of both sound and light waves. Based on Shannon’s theorum, light carries more information than sound so it makes sense that our minds would, when presented with conflicting information. So it is understandable why many people [...]

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Wes Widner on April 1st, 2011

I’ve weighed the evidence, listened to the best debaters, and carefully examined the scriptures. And I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that I simply can’t believe in it anymore. The most articulate priests and prophets were unable to persuade me of the validity of their position. And they were wholly unable to answer the serious [...]

Continue reading about Loosing faith: My deconversion story

If you want to get a good idea of the best way materialists have to deal with the otherwise nihilistic implications of their philosophical system, take a look at this clip from the movie “Rabbit Hole“. I find it interesting how the boy makes the assertion that the notion of parallel universes are 1. infinite [...]

Continue reading about Parallel universes: The materialist’s comfort in the face of death

Wes Widner on February 23rd, 2011

From Pensées 40: If we wished to prove the examples which we take to prove other things, we should have to take those other things to be examples; for, as we always believe the difficulty is in what we wish to prove, we find the examples clearer and a help to demonstration. Thus, when we wish to [...]

Continue reading about Blaise Pascal on universals and particulars

Wes Widner on January 13th, 2011

Continue reading about 5 Flaws In The Thinking Of The New Atheists

Wes Widner on November 30th, 2010

Previously I raised the question of whether we could judge whether something qualified as art or not. I explored the objective definition of art and how two criteria must be met before something can be considered art or not. Now I want to delve into the topic of whether we can measure good art from [...]

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Wes Widner on December 2nd, 2009

I’ve used the phrase “causal determinism” quite a lot recently when talking about the doctrine of Middle Knowledge/Molinism and one of it’s chief competitors, the Calvinistic notion of soverigenty which posits God as being the one who “decrees all that comes to pass”. Since this isn’t a phrase that isn’t often used outside of philosophical [...]

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Wes Widner on November 12th, 2009

Since my post on Molinism/Middle Knowledge garnered some interest I figured it would be helpful to provide some more resources on the subject for anyone who is interested in exploring, as William Lane Craig puts it, such a fruitful doctrine further: Audio William Lane Craig‘s multi-part series “Doctrine of God” taught in his Sunday School class (Defenders) at Johnson Ferry [...]

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Wes Widner on June 7th, 2009

If by secularism we mean philosophical naturalism in the sense that the only reality is the physical reality of atoms, particles, and “laws of nature” to the exclusion of metaphysical constructs such as a soul then our biggest hurdle to overcome, long before we deal with the grounds of any objective morality, is to answer where we get the notion of “ought to” from.

Continue reading about The myth of secular morality