Reading Time: 4 minutes An article co-written by Jonathan MS Pearce and Bert Bigelow Fifty years ago, I was an avid bridge player, and a member of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL). I never made it to Life Master, but I accumulated enough Master Points to qualify for lesser titles like Junior Master. Here is a brief definition […]
meaning
Posted inCulture
It’s times like these when hope is hardest to find—and when it’s needed most
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be progressive and politically engaged this summer is to absorb one blow after another, with more in the offing. The demise of Roe v. Wade. Severe limits slapped onto the EPA’s ability to combat climate change through regulation of power-plant carbon emissions. The specter of Republican-dominated state legislatures being turned loose to administer federal […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The work we do, with the time we have
Reading Time: 6 minutes When I was a wee sprog, I dreamed big. I was going to be a physics professor, working on tricky cosmology problems related to heat and expansion. (I was the precocious twit reading Feynman and Hawking at twelve and, like any twelve-year-old, feeling confident that I understood everything because I’d read a few pop-sci texts.) […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
There is no ‘crisis of meaning’
Reading Time: 3 minutes Over 80 million. That’s how many hits a Google search for “crisis of meaning” generates in the past year alone. It makes sense that “crisis of meaning” would be in people’s minds. We are worried, and with good reason. Here in the US, the pandemic saw a surge in anxiety, depression, and other mental health […]
Posted inPoetry
We’ve got everything here
Reading Time: < 1 minute We’ve got meds for your head when the going gets tough We’ve got taurine in cans when caffeine’s not enough. We’ve got porno and politics, cartoons and stuff So you don’t have to think when you’re down in the dumps Now this little pill, you can take when you’re ill And it makes you feel better like that And we’ve got plenty more for when you […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Meaning of Life: Telic vs Atelic Activities
Reading Time: 4 minutes I wrote a piece yesterday looking at happiness, the meaning of life, and the inherent desire in humans to do more meaningful activities in order to find drive and momentum in life. The idea as that atheism presents a challenge to humans in the fact that there is no ultimate purpose because there is no […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Nihilism, Meaning, God &…World of Tanks…?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Bear with me. I think this makes sense. I occasionally, in this lockdown world, play a game called World of Tanks. For those of you who don’t know this game (and probably don’t care), it is usually a fifteen on fifteen team game where you have to destroy the other team’s tanks to gain XP […]
![By Inside_my_head.jpg: Andrew Mason from London, UK derivative work: -- Jtneill - Talk (Inside_my_head.jpg) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/onlysky.media/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/psychology.jpg?resize=550%2C290&ssl=1)
Posted inUncategorized
The Argument from Reason Boils down to an Argument from Intentionality or Consciousness
Reading Time: 9 minutes As I stated in order to introduce the Argument from Reason in my first post in this series (concerning doxastic voluntarism): CS Lewis fashioned the Argument from Reason and it has since been taken on by Christian philosophers and apologists such as Alvin Plantinga (in the form of the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism – EAAN) […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose, Philosophy
Concerning Metaphysical and Methodological Naturalism
Reading Time: 6 minutes I was having a Tippling Philosophers’ debate concerning naturalism elsewhere and my friend stated this, which is worthy of debate and unpicking: Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics, a […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose, Science, The Secular
Some Questions to Dr J Berger
Reading Time: 5 minutes As some of you will know, I recently edited a book by Joseph J Berger called Science & Spirituality (Barnes & Noble), which is available now (please grab a copy, even though Amazon are being bastardly difficult with their distribution). The book, as you will find out, is aimed predominantly at students as an introduction to scientific […]