Simon Paynton

Muslim women talk about sex abuse by the religious.

What an interesting article.  Why do the abusers always seem to be men?  Maybe because they’re the ones in positions of power.  But it seems that patriarchy and sexual abuse are inextricably linked.  I put this down to the idea that the Patriarchy is a social, cooperativised continuation of the…[Read more]

I was going to ask what was wrong with this article by a Liar for Jesus

The original article, in “Answers in Genesis”, is ridiculous.  For example, we’re back to this:

Many atheists (e.g., Richard Dawkins) spend much of their time railing against the Creator they believe doesn’t exist

I imagine that Dawkins is railing against the Biblical God, an…[Read more]

Makes sense.  Somebody called evolutionary anthropology “philosophising with data”.

Surely, science is the study of things, and philosophy is the study of ideas.  But since ideas are about things, the two can cross over and inform each other.

I actually think the article is reasonable – it was unfamiliar territory at first, but now I understand it – up until here:

There is also mounting evidence of fine-tuning in evolutionary biology, predetermining the course of the development of life.

God is also required to explain immaterial aspects of the universe, such as consciousness,…

[Read more]

You need “to walk in their shoes” before you can fully criticize their ideas or build upon them. by walking their ideas forward with your own shoes on.

I think it’s necessary to fully understand ideas before we criticise them or build on them.  That’s why a muddled writer is not doing us a gift when they don’t explain their ideas clearly.

Can you find anything wrong with this argument for belief in god being rational?

When an idea is presented clearly, it’s a thing of joy.  I know there are plenty of clear-thinking philosophers around.  I’m wondering if Will Jones at The Conservative Woman is one of them.  I find his article unreadable, whereas the Patheos article is very clear, ev…[Read more]

The adversarial culture in philosophy does not serve the truth.

I’m finding the same with this one.  Maybe philosophers are just terrible at presenting their ideas – they don’t know what is relevant to the reader’s understanding of the topic they’re talking about.  They just seem to talk crap, in other words.

Mathematicians, computer p…[Read more]

Can you find anything wrong with this argument for belief in god being rational?

What I find wrong with this argument is that it’s difficult to understand because it uses jargon without proper explanation (e.g., “anti-rational”) – more difficult than it needs to be.  Maybe the audience is professional philosophers who would know these terms…[Read more]

Garden of Eden?  I think the whole world was a Garden of Eden, or certainly tropical places like Africa, before agriculture and city states.  This is because there was not much need for organised religion and strict government, since everyone lived in small culturally homogeneous groups.  After the rise of city states, people were living in la…[Read more]

The search for Eden: in pursuit of humanity’s origins.

I think this article is absolutely fascinating.  It makes sense, from the evidence we have, that humans evolved all over Africa and intermixed their cultures when they were able to.  This demonstrates once again that warfare was more or less unkown in those times, and that humans were col…[Read more]

What a charmer.

Richard Feynman was wrong about beauty and truth in science.

He may be wrong, and there may well be many ugly true theories.  But as well as beauty being in the eye of the beholder, it’s beautiful when the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle click into place, and a theory starts working like a machine.