ellauri021.html on line 952: Worldwide Google searches for atheism/agnosticism searches are greatly down from 10 years ago.
(Lue: jengi on valinnut jo puolensa, nyt eikun latailemaan pyssyjä.)
ellauri096.html on line 110: Unlike the believer in ‘No man is an immortal’, the skeptic has trouble asserting ‘There is no knowledge’. For assertion expresses the belief that one knows. That is why Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I., 3, 226) condemns the assertion ‘There is no knowledge’ as dogmatic skepticism. Sextus prefers agnosticism about knowledge rather than skepticism (considered as “atheism” about knowledge). Yet it just as inconsistent to assert ‘No one can know whether anything is known’. For that conveys the belief that one knows that no one can know whether anything is known.
ellauri096.html on line 114: The agnostic might be tempted to avoid presumptuousness by converting to meta-agnosticism. But this “retreats” in the wrong direction. Meta-meta-proof is, in turn, even more demanding than meta-proof. Meta-meta-proof requires both the epistemological premises about what constitutes proof that meta-proof needs and, in addition, meta-meta-proof needs epistemological premises about what constitutes meta-proof.
ellauri100.html on line 325: The development of my theological views, which I will not trace in detail, has paralleled the development of my political philosophy. My collegiate atheism gradually turned to agnosticism as I came to understand the scientific bankruptcy of atheism. There is not a great gap between agnosticism and deism, and I recently made the small jump across that gap. We like jumping, Sören Kierkegaard, William James and me.
ellauri142.html on line 609: Spencer's reputation among the Victorians owed a great deal to his agnosticism. He rejected theology as representing the 'impiety of the pious.' He was to gain much notoriety from his repudiation of traditional religion, and was frequently condemned by religious thinkers for allegedly advocating atheism and materialism. Nonetheless, unlike Thomas Henry Huxley, whose agnosticism was a militant creed directed at 'the unpardonable sin of faith' (in Adrian Desmond's phrase), Spencer insisted that he was not concerned to undermine religion in the name of science, but to bring about a reconciliation of the two. The following argument is a summary of Part 1 of his First Principles (2nd ed 1867).
ellauri159.html on line 1329: Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of radical empiricism, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,' because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, {viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. Primâ facie the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form.
ellauri163.html on line 752: These studies are correlational, so researchers can´t say for sure whether an inability to imagine other minds actually leads to atheism or agnosticism or whether the link is caused by God. The researchers did control for religious service attendance, assuming that the socially inept might be less likely to flex their mentalizing muscles by mingling at church each week. That analysis showed that religious service attendance could not explain the link between autismlike traits and belief. Those with sedentary mental behavior were just as apt to have a will to believe as not.
ellauri183.html on line 56: Earlier thinkers, however, were Sanjaya Belatthaputta, a 5th-century BCE Indian philosopher who expressed agnosticism about any afterlife, and Protagoras, a 5th-century BCE Greek philosopher who expressed agnosticism about the existence of the gods.
xxx/ellauri168.html on line 312: He further speculates that all information-bearing systems may be conscious, leading him to entertain the possibility of conscious thermostats and a qualified panpsychism he calls panprotopsychism. Chalmers maintains a formal agnosticism on the issue, even conceding that the viability of panpsychism places him at odds with the majority of his contemporaries. According to Chalmers, his arguments are similar to a line of thought that goes back to Leibniz's 1714 "mill" argument.
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 199: But if Hemingway’s conversions were sincere — and there is little reason to think they were not — then his “cod” is not based on the agnosticism of a disillusioned existentialist, but rather on the comprehensive, universal affirmation of Christianity.
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