The certainty of (real) knowledge

Last fall, a few days before Halloween and about a month after the publication of Mind and Cosmos, the controversial new book by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, several of the world's leading philosophers gathered with a group of cutting-edge scientists in the conference room of a charming inn in the Berkshires. They faced one another around a big table set with pitchers of iced water and trays of hard candies wrapped in cellophane and talked and talked, as public intellectuals do. PowerPoint was often brought into play.

Are we so important?

The first question: if Mother Nature is a dead "thing", and her resources are for humans to freely conquer and exploit, how could she give and support life to all the inhabitants that lived in her home? We could then deduce that Mother Nature is, in fact, a living 'being'.

Now why do humans believe in the simplistic view that carbon dioxide will 'cause' the world to warm up and thereby 'cause' the changes in the climate we are currently witnessing now? No, even this does not have the power to unleash so much destruction in so many places at once. That is just an anthropomorphic world view that everything in life revolves around us humans.

Reflections On Evil

What is evil? Historically, the question of evil has been a theological one. Generations of theological apologists have written entire libraries of books in an attempt to certify the existence of a Good God that created an imperfect world. Saint Augustine distinguished between two forms of evil: “moral evil”, the evil humans do, by choice, knowing that they are doing wrong; and “natural evil”, the bad things that just happen - the storm, the flood, volcanic eruptions, fatal disease.

And then, there is what Andrew Lobaczewski calls Macro-social Evil: large scale evil that overtakes whole  societies and nations, and has done so again and again since  time  immemorial. The history of mankind, when considered objectively, is a terrible thing.