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Over the next few posts, I’m going to do some heavy metaphysics. So a bit of background is necessary. An ontology is a taxonomy of categories (usually at a very high level of generality). To avoid misunderstanding, the ontology I’m working with is outlined below. This ontology is naturalistic in exactly the sense that objects [...]
Archive for the ‘Naturalism’ Category
Some Naturalistic Ontology
December 16th, 2011 
Eric Steinhart 
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Rationalism, Science 
26 Comments »Do Atheists Worship Truth?
December 15th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Although many atheists seem hostile to metaphysics, that hostility is misplaced. Any deep philosophical position is bound to presuppose some metaphysics. Pure reason is also highly abstract. Should pure reason be constrained by empirical evidence? How? All efforts to specify any criterion of empirical verifiability or falsifiablity have failed. Science today is highly abstract – [...]
Atheism and Beauty
December 14th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Some atheists seem to be inspired by a thorough-going hatred of metaphysics; perhaps even a thorough-going hatred of all abstract reasoning. They are radical positivists (or radical nominalists, but I’ll focus on positivism). Positivism is the doctrine that only that which is empirically verifiable has any truth or reality. And while radical positivism does imply [...]
Criticizing Wicca: Energy
December 13th, 2011 Eric Steinhart On the basis of my reading of a few Wiccan texts, I said that Wiccans believe that their ultimate deity is the ultimate immanent creative power of being. This is an old Platonic idea. The existence of such a power of being is endorsed by a number of atheistic philosophers (like Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and [...]
Atheistic Holidays
December 12th, 2011 Eric Steinhart As Christianity came to dominate older pagan religions, it Christianized their holidays. The holidays were not abandoned, they were modified. And as Christianity fades away, the holidays are becoming de-Christianized. The main Western religious holidays were pagan before Christianity and they are becoming pagan again after Christianity. If atheism is ever to become a successful [...]
Nine Theses on Wicca and Atheism
December 11th, 2011 Eric Steinhart I’m planning a pretty long series of posts here. Mainly, I’m going to be arguing for several theses. I won’t do posts that present them one by one; each post will typically deal with many theses. Here they are: The first thesis is that as Christianity declines in America, two communities will be growing: an [...]
Posted in Atheism, Culture, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion, Religion and Science, Wicca 33 Comments »On Atheistic Religion
December 10th, 2011 Eric Steinhart We’re rational animals. Which means that we’re rational. And that we’re animals. Many biological and neurological necessities are satisfied by religion. Your neocortex has to live with your limbic system. And as long as we humans have limbic systems in our brains, we’re going to be religious (more on that later). Atheists tend to downplay [...]
The Wiccan Deity: Related Concepts in Philosophy
December 9th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Eric Steinhart here. On my analysis of several key Wiccan texts, I’ve said that the Wiccan deity is the ultimate immanent creative power of being. This is a non-theistic and non-Christian concept of the divine. Please try to avoid projecting theistic or Christian concepts into Wicca. The Wiccan deity is not a thing; on the [...]
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Nietzsche, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion, Religion and Science, Wicca 41 Comments »The Wiccan Deity: An Initial Philosophical Analysis
December 8th, 2011 Eric Steinhart More from Eric Steinhart on the Wiccan ultimate deity (which I’ll just refer to as the Wiccan deity). This deity is not the Wiccan god or the goddess, but is ontologically prior to them. My purpose in this post is to talk about some of the features of this deity and its relation to some [...]
Posted in Atheism, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Paganism, Philosophy, Religion and Science, Wicca 17 Comments »The Wiccan Deity
December 7th, 2011 Eric Steinhart It’s Eric Steinhart here again. I’m going to begin my critical philosophical posts on Wicca by dealing with the Wiccan ultimate deity. First, I’ll present some quotes from Wiccans describing this deity. Next (in a separate post), I’ll do some analysis and compare and contrast this deity with some other deities in the Western religious [...]
Atheism and Wicca
December 5th, 2011 Eric Steinhart Hi there! I’m Eric Steinhart, helping out here at Camels With Hammers. I’m always interested in new religious movements, especially the emergence of new types of Western religion. So I’ve been interested in watching the emergence of neo-paganism in America. America is supposed to be a Christian nation; yet, as every atheist surely knows, Christianity [...]
On Evolution
August 9th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart A process atheist is someone who agrees that every question that used to be answered by appealing to God can be better answered by appealing to some form of evolution. So you might wonder about the meaning of the term evolution. Since the term evolution is abstract, it’s definition will be abstract: [...]
Process Atheism
August 8th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart A process atheist is someone who agrees that every question that used to be answered by appealing to God can be better answered by appealing to some form of evolution. Dan Fincke gets credit for coining the phrase “process atheism”. Process atheism is one type of atheism among many. Process atheism is [...]
Posted in Atheism, Featured, Metaphysics, Naturalism, Philosophy, Rationalism, Religion and Science 4 Comments »Some Explanations for Our Universe
August 5th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart The following is a quick-and-dirty survey of the current literature on explanations of our universe: It is widely thought that our universe is highly unusual. It has certain features that make it lovely. Note that the term “lovely” is merely a term of art. It has no connotations beyond designating that our [...]
On the Dangers of Inflation
August 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart It’s been great to get feedback from so many readers! I appreciate the time and effort you’ve taken here. One shared concern is that I’m trying to compel people to believe some abstruse doctrine. I’m not — at least not yet! All I’ve said so far is that an atheist has no [...]
An Atheistic Evolutionary Metaphysics
August 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Here’s an argument for an evolutionary metaphysics: (1) Our universe is very complex and congenial (it is lawful; it starts in a low entropy state; its laws are finely tuned for the planetary evolution of life, etc.). (2) Anything that is very complex and congenial requires an explanation. (3) The best explanations [...]
An Example of Atheist Faith
August 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Here’s a nice statement of atheistic faith by Carl Sagan: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” (1980: 1). Such a statement is as faith-based as any statement in the Bible or in Christian theology. After all, it’s just a mirror-image of the statement that God [...]
The Church of Google: Google is God
April 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Many thanks to Zike for pointing me to The Church of Google. The Church of Google website gives nine lovely arguments for the divinity of Google. The Church of Google website also gives excellent replies to objections against the divinity of Google. Brilliant! Guest Contributor Eric Steinhart is a professor of philosophy [...]
Philosophy Can Debunk Myths About Atheism
March 13th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by James Gray Many people are taught many strange things about atheists. For example, supposedly atheists can’t be moral, can’t have a source of “meaning” in their lives, and can’t attain knowledge. Many atheists will say that they are being misrepresented by theists because they believe morality, meaning, and knowledge can exist without God. The [...]
Atheistic Design Arguments
March 7th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart All design arguments reason from the organization in our universe to the existence of some divine designer. What does this designer do? Design implies deliberate selection from a plurality of alternative possibilities. It cannot be selection from one possibility nor can it be random selection. It has to be rational selection. According [...]
The Atheistic Fine Tuning Argument
March 6th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Every one of the standard arguments for the existence of God can be reformulated as an argument against the existence of God. Consider the Fine Tuning Argument. The theistic version of the Fine Tuning Argument goes like this: (1) The Fine Tuning Argument is sound. (2) If the Fine Tuning Argument is [...]
Physics is Grounded in Mathematics
March 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Mathematics is effective in science. Wigner (1960: 14) regards this effectiveness as magical: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” The prudent reply that it is surely not very scientific to [...]
Can Atheists do Math?
March 2nd, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart Leibniz’s version of the cosmological argument (his Sufficient Reason Argument) runs from the continency of our universe to the existence of some necessary being. This necessary being is the ground of our universe. The ground isn’t part of our universe – it stands in no spatial, temporal, or causal relation to any [...]
Atheism and Leibniz
February 28th, 2011 Daniel Fincke by Eric Steinhart The cosmological argument is really a family of arguments. Some of the cosmological arguments are very concrete. Aquinas’s Second Way and the Kalam Argument (popularized by William Lane Craig) reason back to some first cause of the universe at the beginning of time. Atheists (like Quentin Smith) have given various replies to [...]
Naturalism As True By Definition
July 18th, 2009 Daniel Fincke Jason Streitfeld weighs in on the question of naturalism or supernaturalism, treated by Sean Carroll here, John Pieret here, and Shane and me in these this post and then this one. Streitfeld’s post is excellent so read it in full. Scientists do not rely on any notion of the supernatural to formulate their conception of [...]
Posted in Atheism, Biology, Creationism, Divine Intervention, Evolution, Law, Naturalism, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Physics, Religion and Science, Science 
Tags: Creationism, Intelligent Design, Jason Streitfeld, John Pieret, Metaphysics, Methodological Naturalism, Occam's Razor, Philosophical Naturalism, Scientific Demarcation, Scientific Method, Sean Carroll, Simplicity, Supernatural, Supernaturalism No Comments »
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