DP latches on to another dubious miracle story

[drumdude]

Lolololol

[Kishkumen]

There have been hundreds of studies demonstrating social behavior and willingness to help others on the part of many different animals. Species that can be altruistic seem to have a better odds of thriving and reproducing than those which are not, even if altruistic behavior may be detrimental to individual members of the population.

Bingo. Indeed. I remember arguing about this with a philosophy student at BYU back in the day. As a lifelong “owner” of pets and observer of animals, I thought this was the case, but the philosopher was not having it.

[drumdude]

Like this cat who saved a toddler from a dog attack:

https://youtu.be/EEa6jZv-Khc

Clearly the cat will be going straight to the celestial kingdom and getting its own world for this heroism.

[Alphus and Omegus]

I clicked on over to Peterson's place and saw a few more of his attempts to debate with atheism. It was pretty amusing that he is stuck trying to make arguments against books from 2008 to 2010 from Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. Literally none of these men were ever regarded as serious atheist philosophers and both Dawkins and Harris have lost a considerable amount of popular esteem in recent years that they once had.

Dan is arguing with out-of-date books by people who never influenced atheist thought. No wonder his comments section is a ghost town (in addition to his iron-clad censorship of critical comments.)

Alphus and Omegus, Your statement is a bit of a tease. Are there some significant advances in atheist philosophy in the past decade or so?

Yes those folks you mention were speaking more as social influencers than philosophers I believe. Some have pointed out that atheism is a lack of belief in God not a particular philosophy. Of course that leaves the posiblity of atheism having a significant role in some philosophic thought.

First of all, almost anyone who actually is able to be a paid philosopher is an atheist.

https://gizmodo.com/what-percentage-of- ... -485784336

This means that the vast majority of people whose entire job is to examine ideas do not believe in gods. That's a very serious thing to contemplate if you are a believer in any particular faith or god. Typically the response I have seen by believers is nothing more than a defense mechanism: "These philosophers are big meanies and so who cares what they think. They're biased." It's not a logical argument of any kind, however, because it fails to address that the present reality of philosophers being overwhelmingly atheistic was something that happened over time. Religions' claims simply do not add up and if your job is to make claims which can be defended successfully, you soon discover this.

The fact that the vast majority of philosophers are atheists also means that it's not adequate to describe there being any singular kind of "atheist philosophy." There are lots of atheist philosophers, but because their ideas are so varied, it does not make sense to try to group them together under the umbrella of "atheist philosophy," especially since the idea of proving or disproving the existence of gods is actually a very hackneyed and boring subject within the realm of academic philosophy. It was settled long ago that all human religions are false and thus the only real point of difference might be between hard or soft atheism, a distinction which ultimately is irrelevant. There's no all powerful and all-benevolent being keeping watch so whether there are zero, one, or multiple creator beings is really just a matter of unprofitable speculation. Most output that I've seen from academic philosophy tends to be in more observable areas such as consciousness, intelligence, ethics, gender, perception, emotions, free will, technology, animal rights, politics, etc.

There are of course, some philosophers who enjoy playing in the playground of religion and belief. Daniel Dennett is a much higher-quality atheist advocate than the three Peterson seems to know from his light reading. J. L. Schellenberg has written several great books and essays on the problems of religion and natural-derived ethics. Richard Carrier is interesting to me as well.

[Alphus and Omegus]

Oh I guess I could also add that the idea of "ignosticism" is kind of fun from am atheistic standpoint. Basically it's the idea that the classical theistic concept of "God" is inherently illogical and so therefore it's impossible to believe or disbelieve in it.

[Gadianton]

Almost forgot, every couple of years when a certain blog owner brings up the miracle of altruism I have to point out that "altruism" itself was invented by an atheist. Aguste Comte. It's weird that the blog owner is even interested in coopting altruism for team believer since it's the beating heart of socialism, and the blog owner is so into cheering for "price gouging". In that view of market efficiency, the best thing those passing by could have done would have been to exercise ruthless self-interest and charged 20 grand for bandages or 500 dollars for a sip of water.

I sometimes wonder if the blog owner has ever considered slowing down on the defensiveness and putting some real time into figuring out what he actually believes.