Sunday, October 27, 2013

The Large God Collider

The Large Hadron Collider (“LHC”) was able to detect what many physicists understand to be the (or “a”) Higgs Boson. It determined to a 5-sigma probability that its mass resides in the 126 GeV area. Thousands of people, billions of dollars and decades have been expended in this search for one of the building blocks of reality.


The Large God Collider (“LGC”) has not yielded any results - because it hasn’t been built. Theists and the organizations they belong to - religions, if we must - have not seen fit to employ thousands of people, billions of dollars and decades in the search for a god. I’m personally disappointed by this. I think the spectacle of smashing less powerful supernatural entities together - maybe some garden gnomes - to produce an indication of a higher-powered supernatural entity - say an invisible pink dragon - would be fun for the whole family.




What could be the reason the LGC hasn’t been built?




Anyone?




Bueller?



Saturday, October 26, 2013

Sense and Goodness without God

I have to ’fess up to lacking motivation lately. The general arguments against theism - or the supernatural in any form that I’m aware of - are too strong for me to take theism seriously right now. And lesser baloney just hardly seems interesting - at least this month. That’s not to say that there isn’t good larnin’ to be had out thar in the internetz.


Case in point: Richard Carrier recently took the Objective Moral Values topic to new heights in his posts “What Exactly Is Objective Moral Truth?”i & “The Moral Truth Debate: Babinski & Shook”. Therein, it becomes clear that Carrier expects commenters to be at least familiar with his relevant other writings, so I took the bait and purchased Sense and Goodness Without God.


I like Carrier’s writing. It’s scholarly and extraordinarily well organized. It is essentially a thesis that defines “worldview”, then goes about in fine detail how to construct a rational one without resorting to God. I’m only a third of the way through it, because I tend to stop and reflect often and at length when reading works of this nature, but I’ll go out on a limb (not very far) and recommend it. At the very least, the clear and logical layout is a template for most of us to follow - but I’ll bet the content will be enjoyable and instructive to most free thinkers as well.


Buy it!